


What I do, Tonight

by KatZen, MooseFeels



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Police, Constantine Cas, Cop Dean Winchester, Hellblazer AU - Freeform, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Mystery, Police, Schizophrenia, Seattle, Therapist Gabriel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:16:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3465641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatZen/pseuds/KatZen, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester hasn't seen his brother Sam in four years, and Sam hasn't left the hospital since the fire. Castiel's just trying to keep the city of Seattle safe from the weird trouble and let the cops handle the regular trouble. <br/>Lot of weird trouble is coming to the Emerald City.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It's quiet in the ward.

It's always quiet in the ward--usually, really.

Wake up at nine, breakfast is nine-thirty. Then there’s the rotating schedule: group or solo or crafts or outside. Lunch. Afternoon meds. Group or solo or crafts or outside. Evening meds. Back to rooms. The schedules make it quiet, the schedules keep it quiet. They need the schedules in the ward. Sam needs the schedules. Most of it, at least.

Sometimes, Sam misses the lack of structure. Sometimes, when Sam misses school and cars and food he's cooked and his brother and Jess, smart, kind, beautiful Jess, he'll think of how loud it was outside of the hospital and he won't miss it so much anymore.

Structure makes things quiet.

He's been here a long time. Long enough that he has a few privileges. He's always had his own room, but now he also has a record player and some books and as many notebooks and pens as he can ask for. Old law textbooks, a few journalistic pieces on birth defects in frogs or the industrial food system. No fiction.

Sam doesn't like fiction and he sure didn't like the little Gideon Bible that he found in nightstand four years ago after checking himself in.

Other people in the hospital, they came and went.

Four years.

They also don't make him socialize much. They make him see the therapist, they make him go to group. They don't make him talk, though, and they don't make him tell the story any more.

The therapists have learned to just read the file. They don't ask anymore, after the fourth left to live in Hawaii, to teach middle school art.

They stopped sending the interns in, the residents, the ones who would walk into the room with earnest eyes and a deeply, if briefly held belief that they would fix Sam.

Fixing is no longer on the table. Sam is maintained. Sam...maintains.

It's four am when Sam wakes up.

The smallest pill takes care of the dreams. The orange pill takes care of the insomnia. The blue pill takes care of the voices. Not one of them works fast enough.

I'm coming, it says.

Sam takes a deep breath. He feels it follow his nerves, from his sinuses down his spine to the tiny branching paths at his hands and feet.

The sound of his deep inhalation rings loud in his ears like the inward rush of a tide.

Sam doesn't talk any more.

He talked during the bad time, but not anymore.

Sam exhales, and he feels the breath leave a warm blaze as it flows outward.

The blinds are drawn in the room where they have him. The paper, folding kind of blinds that leave the glass completely invisible. And they took the mirror out of the bathroom near him, too. He shows up in the reflections, actively. Sam barely remembers what he looks like anymore, between the lack of mirrors and the fact that they few times he used them since it happened it wasn’t him he was looking at in there.

 _I am coming_ , Sam Winchester.

Sam grits his teeth tightly and draws his hands against his ribs to feel the steady inward, outward flex of his torso.

 _I am coming_ , the voice roars.

Sam shouts in his empty room.

Can't happen again.

* * *

 

The alarm clock is too goddamn loud.

It's a necessary evil, really, otherwise he sleeps through it and stays asleep for thirty six hour periods, or until the nicotine shake gets so severe that he falls out of bed and wakes himself up. Something about the pill he's on, some endless, instant REM cycle or something. That’s what the doctor says it is- the general practitioner and the shrink both. The priest, though, in the church on Bainbridge, and the psychic downtown where all the tourists go both know better. Both have confirmed Castiel’s suspicion, with that soft, pitying look.

God, Castiel hates the customer-service ends of the job and the people who work it.

Still, Castiel can't remember the last time he didn't wake up fucking gasping.

He reaches over the clock and grabs a pack of smokes and a lighter and one-two-three clicks the flame up and inhales deeply to light the damn thing and he burns through his first cigarette of the day, last of the carton, before he's even put on a shirt.

His chest aches as he sits up in bed. His teeth ache too, but that's a different problem, that's the whiskey that's also worming through his blood as a headache and a fierce nausea.

He coughs heavily and phlegm comes up hard and terrible and fucking pungent. A smell he can taste. A cancer he can taste.

Castiel hates it.

Castiel hates everything, honestly, but mornings make the list pretty far up.

The phone rings.

Fucking of course, he thinks.

Castiel spits onto his floor and staggers across his one room apartment to the phone. He picks it up.

" _Cas- Cas- Cas_ ," Kevin stammers on the end of the line. _"Problems. Bad- bad problems. Lighting up all over nei-neighbrohood. P-precinct. Gabe told me to call you. Bad. Very bad_."

Castiel sighs. In spite of himself.

"How bad," he sighs.

 _"Black eyes_ ," Kevin answers.

"Fuck," Castiel barks into the phone and hangs up.

He shrugs easily into his suit, runs his hands through his hair, and heads out.

Today is going to fucking _suck_.

* * *

 

Dean sits on the bend in front of the precinct desk and rolls his neck and shoulders. He inhales long a deep and feels his black leather belt settle lower on his hips, his blue starched shirt stretching over his pecs, his eyes dancing under their lids.

He wonders what Sam is doing.

He doesn’t let him see him. He doesn’t let him call. He doesn’t write letters back and he’s not allowed to have a computer. They tell him roughly what his schedule looks like but they don’t tell him anything specific. _Is he happy? Is he well? How does he feel?_

Dean misses his brother like he misses a limb.

He rubs the crucifix in his pocket. It’s attached to ten decades of beads but it’s the silver, suffering Christ on the cross that he worries under his thumb, feeling the tiny raised chest, the round knob of the bowed and aching head.

He murmurs a _Hail Mary_ under his breath.

“Winchester,” the sergeant behind the desk barks, “your feet broken?”

Dean opens his eyes and looks at Harvelle, behind the desk and smiles reflexively. “Weird night,” he answers. “Sam had a bad night.”

As the only living relative, Dean’s the one they call when there’s an Incident. Capital _Eye_ Incident.

Harvelle nods.

Ellen’s an old friend. A family friend, and god knows Dean wouldn’t have a spot on the force without her. Bunch of guys on the force know about Sam now, anyway. It’s not really something Dean can hide. He doesn’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, he doesn’t have pets. His salary doesn’t go to some big house in the nice suburbs or a coke habit or gambling or...or anything. Not nice clothes or a garage band or something. It’s not like he hides it, anyway. It’s not really something he can hide.

Sam and Dean.

Dean stands up and cracks his neck.

Charlie comes through the doors, her own starched blue shirt pulling over her chest, her red ponytail flowing out of the other side of her black hat.

“Alright, princess,” she says, grinning, “Let’s hit the streets.”

Dean drives. Charlie takes shotgun. And they patrol.

There’s a coin of Saint Michael that Dean superglued to the dash a few years ago. Charlie’s not religious, but as she put it, “We could use all the help we could get, eh Winchester?” Dean wouldn’t call what he is religious, at any rate.

Dean turns on their radio. Charlie hands him a cup of coffee.

“How’s Gilda?” Dean asks after a sip.

Charlie flips through a notebook from yesterday, wiggles a knob on the radar gun, and replies, “She’s good. The kindergarteners are driving her crazy- I keep telling her they’d pay her better at St. George’s to teach high school but she loves the munchkins.”

Dean shakes his head in response. “She’s a weird lady,” he says.

Charlie points the radar gun toward the street. “Can’t be helped,” she grunts, shrugging. “Hey, I heard about Sam. Everything okay?”

“He had a bad slip,” he answers. “They’re upping the dosage on one of his drugs and encouraging him to socialize more with the other people.”

“Still no word?” she asks. The radar gun beeps.

“No contact,” Dean says.

They don’t say anything else for a few hours. Sit in the car and catch speeders, write tickets. They’re there until about two that afternoon when a radio call comes in. Dean drives, Charlie takes receiver.

“Dispatch, this is 85,” Charlie murmurs into the receiver.

And they drive downtown.

* * *

 

It’s not that this job is ever a good one.

It’s not. It drains him and it empties him and it’s never good.

But there are days when it’s bearable. Days when the souls he saves get chalked up on the board, weighed against the souls he couldn’t, and the balance feels acceptable.

But those days usually do not start with the words black eyes coming from Kevin’s mouth.

His hangover hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s not a good time, so the pulse in his forehead is pounding out a rhythm like a demented fucking high school band percussion section from Hell and that metaphor got away from him somewhere along the way, so he rolls the window down and hopes that some cool air might help.

It doesn’t, really. But it doesn’t hurt, either, so he leaves it down.

Kevin tried calling back. Twice. It’s possible that swearing and hanging up the phone didn’t do anything for the kid’s already-jangled nerves, but what does he expect when he drops a bomb like that?

But he didn’t pick up because he knew it would be more stammering and more high-strung anxious Cas Cas Cas and if he’s got black eyes in his immediate future then he doesn’t have time for Kevin’s twitchiness. He’s sure he’ll get a call from Gabriel about that in the next couple of days. He’s in recovery, Cas, come on, don’t be a dick.

There are seven rapidly consecutive beeps signalling text messages.

He doesn’t touch the phone until he gets into the parking lot. No one’s ever called him risk-averse, but he would be pissed if he survived everything that got thrown at him just to get killed on the road because he was fucking texting.

Also, he hates the damn thing, though he considers it another necessary evil.

He picks up the phone once he’s parked and unlocks it, thumbing the texting icon reluctantly. A big, urgent, red numeral fifteen sits atop the green box, like it’s something that he ought to find important.

Hell, somebody needs to get in touch with him that bad, they can fucking summon him.

Kevin’s texting style is as staccato as his spoken voice, and Castiel can hear the breathlessness in it. It’s like something has been wrapped around the kid ever since the possession, and it’s never let up on him. Like something is sitting on his chest, and Castiel hasn’t been able to push it off, hard as he shoves.

_Cas pick up_

_Okay you’re probably driving_

_Don’t pick up_

_I’m gonna link you the reports that gabe sent me ok_

_Just click on the addresses and your phone browser wll open the pages_

_There’s three reports so far don’t know if SPD is on the scene but it’s possible_

_Just don’t get arrested ok cas you’re the only one who knows how to fix the a/c_

Castiel is torn between irritation that Kevin thinks he doesn’t know how to open a link on a fucking smart phone--he hates them, but he’s not stupid--and reluctant amusement at Kevin’s pitiful attempt at playing it cool with his last message.

There are not many people that Castiel tolerates in this world or any other. Kevin Tran is the extremely rare exception.

He doesn’t say it much, but he figures it’s understood. Wouldn’t want the kid getting a big head or anything.

He parks the car, sending up a quick gratitude to anyone listening that there was a spot open in his zone, and he begins the trek to Gabriel’s office.

Necessary evils.

* * *

 

The worst thing about Gabriel’s office is the sun lamp.

Not usually. Usually, the worst thing about Gabriel’s office is Gabriel.That’s actually saying something, though, given that the walls are a particular shade of aqua and there’s one of those pictures of a baby inside of a flower with a headband on or something. Gabriel inherited it from the last occupant and he hasn’t taken it down. Castiel suspects it’s just to fuck with him. There’s also the complete lack of any parking in the area and the yoga studio down the street and the bubble tea place with the chairs hogging the sidewalk--

But usually he’s not woken up in the morning by a panicked Kevin and a call to action before he can even have his fucking coffee, so today, the sun lamp is the worst thing.

So he turns it off.

“Not like I need it, when your sunny disposition is in the building,” Gabriel chirps as he darts into the room, dropping a file heavily on the table. The office’s receptionist isn’t in yet, just the two of them here.

Castiel grunts an acknowledgment to Gabriel as he makes his way to the best part of Gabriel’s office, which is the always-full pot of coffee.

“And no, I don’t have any clients for the next half-hour. It’s always so respectful, how you ask if I’m busy,” he adds.

Gabriel could have a whole conversation with himself, if he wanted to. Hell, he could have a whole conversation with someone else without opening his mouth if the fancy struck him.

“Kevin told me you called. I came. You owe me more than coffee for that.” Castiel grabs a mug that says _social workers do it in groups_ in garish green text.

“So sorry to bother you with, you know, your holy calling or whatever,” he replies, rolling his eyes.

Gabriel reaches around and takes another mug, this time a white one that says _social worker by day, bigfoot hunter by night_ with a cartoon sasquatch lumbering across it. Castiel hands him the carafe when he’s done with it.

One, two, three drags of the hot, bitter coffee, and then Castiel is minimally prepared to talk to his brother.

“Kevin mentioned black eyes,” he murmurs around the taste of it. It’s rare that he drinks coffee that hasn’t been burnt by the percolator.

Gabriel sighs, running his hand over his face, and takes his coffee over to his desk. Castiel goes to the door and shuts it before taking a seat in the other chair in the cramped room.

He bites his lips for a moment before saying, “There’s been some buzz from a couple of clients. A few reports, some that got passed on to the cops. Kevin should have those. But then Susan came in talking about it.”

Castiel narrows his eyes. Susan is a name he’s familiar with--one of Gabriel’s younger clients, early thirties, and when she came in Gabriel was really torn between whether he should call Castiel with her rantings or whether he should call in a psychiatric consult. He was getting mixed feelings from her. He got her into therapy but kept listening, and eventually she was substantiated enough that he just started believing her. Turns out sometimes people are both schizophrenic and sensitive.

Gabriel hadn’t gotten into social work hoping to be Castiel’s informant, but somehow, people who said crazy shit were sometimes saying it because they’d seen crazy shit.

“She said that she’d seen a guy she knew from the shelter talking to himself when she was down by the stadiums. Not his usual scene, she said, so she went up to see if he was all right. When she got there he was talking into a bowl and she said it smelled like blood. She started backing up, getting out of his way, but she managed to get a glimpse of his eyes. Pitch-black, whites and all.”

“Get a glimpse, like--”

“Like he looked at her, yeah.”

“And it let her go?”

Gabriel takes a long sip of coffee.

“She said she found a beat cop around and stuck with him until she could get a bus back up to her housing. She said she wasn’t sure if he followed her or not.”

“If you can get her admitted, it’d probably be safer,” Castiel says, downing the rest of his coffee quickly and putting the mug back next to the coffee pot. “Any pretense.”

“Wouldn’t take much pretense, she meets all the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.”

“Because she’s schizophrenic, Gabriel.”

“Hey, who’m I to judge?” Gabriel asks acerbically. “I can validate half the shit she says, who knows about the other half? Who the fuck knows if anybody’s schizophrenic anymore? The DSM doesn’t ask whether or not you actually saw a demon.”

Castiel has already turned to walk out the door. But he pauses.

They’re not close, him and Gabriel. Haven’t been in a long time. He knows how long Gabe tried to deny his gift, and he can feel the resentment that Gabriel holds against him for dragging him back into this shitshow like a physical thing. But Gabriel is still his brother. And he can still spare some guilt for what’s happened to him, alongside all the guilt he so liberally spreads around to everyone else he hasn’t managed to save.

“Gabriel.”

Gabriel waves a hand at him, and it’s so transparent in its attempt at dismissiveness but it comes across as genuinely weary.

“Go be a big damn hero or whatever,” he says. “I have paperwork to do because I’m a grown-up.”

Castiel is no good at pushing Feelings Talk.

So he goes.

* * *

 

Charlie doesn’t eat vegan, but Gilda does, and Gilda, god bless her heart, packs a lunch for both Dean and Charlie every day. It’s damn kind of her, especially given that they’re making ends meet on cop and teacher’s joint salary and that vegan shit ain’t cheap. Charlie eats all of it (girl has a metabolism like a goddamn trash compactor) and Dean usually eats about half and then they’ll grab something in the area to split afterwards. Usually with beef or cheese or both.

Today, she’s packed a spinach salad with bean sprouts and her marinated tofu and sunflower seeds and a home-made mustard dressing. It’s alright, but as soon as they’re both done, she turns to him and says, “Pierogi or that place with the sopressata? I’ll treat.”

Dean snorts around a mouthful of gatorade. “Come on,” he says. “Don’t you feel like you’re cheating or something?”

Charlie looks at him like he just farted egregiously. “No,” she says. “Gilda grew up in that place in California- last time she had beef she had fucking braces and it was an animal she had raised since she was in pullups- no, Gilda doesn’t ask questions she doesn’t want the answers to, okay?”

Dean can’t help but laugh. Gilda and Charlie are good people.

“No, okay, for this, we’re doing pierogi, and you’re paying,” she says, turning the ignition and steering the car back out into the fray of traffic. The thing navigates like a boat- other people on the department have cars that are gas efficient little hondas and shit but he and Charlie have wound up with one of those boxy machines from the mid-seventies somehow, with giant headlights and a tape deck instead of a CD player or an mp3 hookup. It’s damn comfy, but it’s a bitch in traffic, and it’s three thirty right now, with the school buses out and about, too. Dean doesn’t mind too much, though. He likes cars. Grew up in cars.

It’s quiet between them for a while before Charlie says, “So there’s this woman at Gilda’s yoga class-”

“Aw, Christ, Charlie, come on,” he says. “Not you, too. I mean, coming from Ellen and Anna it doesn’t surprise me but you too? I’m betrayed. Hurt.”

“I tried telling her, dude, but Gilda worries about you, man. I mean, I worry about you, too, but Gilda thinks you need someone who can...I mean, everyone knows you want kids-”  
“Stop,” Dean interrupts.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to procreate and have a million little yous running around but you’re going to need to-”“Stop,” Dean repeats.

“Or maybe you want to adopt or something, I don’t know-”

“Charlie, please,” he says.

“Look okay, you’re my friend. I’m fucking emotionally invested in you, sue me,” she adds. “And Gilda’s invested by extension and we just...we want you to be happy.”

There’s silence between them for a moment, before Dean says, “I know. I get it. Just...please. Alright?”

“We’re here,” she says.

The pierogi place is little bitty- a hole in the wall run by a family that’s been in the space for something like thirty years without painting the walls or getting new chairs or new televisions. It smells like boiling water and steam and cabbage inside of the space. There’s an orthodox cross set into the tile behind the counter, an image of Saint Nicholas of Brooklyn on the counter. The father and mother who originally ran the place are sequestered upstairs, but their kids run the place, their speech floating between English and Polish rapidly. Tiny old women come in, their hair wrapped up in scarves. Beflanneled hipsters come in. Cops and firemen come in. It’s a good spot.

“Dean, Charlie,” Chuck says from behind the counter, wiping his hands on his apron. “The usual? Two dozen and a couple of coffees?”

“Chuck, you beautiful bastard,” Charlie replies, “did you know we were coming?”

Chuck smiles. It’s a good look on him.

Dean actually met Chuck in a support group. Schizophrenia runs in his family, but just the regular kind. Not the kind that’s not schizophrenia and instead something...uglier. He took his brother’s death hard, he stopped taking his meds and started drinking again. But he’s doing better now. Still a twitchy kinda guy, though. Nervous.

“Call it a feeling,” he says. He calls to the back, presumably to the teenaged cousin here from Lublin to work. Sweet kid, weird name- Inias. “They’ll be out in a jiff. How’s the beat looking?”

Dean shrugs. Charlie repeats the motion.

They don’t use the _q_ word.

Chuck nods. He doesn’t use it either. He’s known the two of them long enough to know the superstitions. And most people think Dean is just superstitious. Chalk it up to a weird childhood and a couple of bad run-ins with luck or the inexplicable or something. No one thinks it’s _real_ like Dean _knows_ it is. But Chuck’s a good guy.

He hands them a white paper sack a minute or so later, as well as two tall coffees. “How much you need again?” Dean asks.

Chuck shakes his head. “For you? No charge,” he answers.

“Aw, Chuck, c’mon. Becky’ll have a stroke if she finds out,” Dean says, pulling out his wallet.

“Then she won’t find out,” Chuck says. “I know you don’t eat right. Your money’s no good here. Get back to the good work.”

Charlie grins. “Chuck, you’re an angel,” she says, and they ease out of the door and back onto the street.

They sit on the hood of the car, setting up the food and coffee. They’ve got one ear on the scanner and one ear on the street, but mostly they’re enjoying the fact that there hasn’t been a crisis yet or anything.

Seattle.

 _Four o’clock and all is well_.

Of course, as soon as Dean has the thought he realizes that it’s all going to go to shit.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

It won’t be in SoDo. Not anymore.

It’s probably ditched the meatsuit altogether, once it got made. But there are always traces, always tracks, and besides, Castiel could really go for some pho, so he makes his way down south.

It’s heading up on evening on a weekday so there’s not a ton of people around. It’s not summer, so there’s no tourists, only pockets of people waiting at the bus stops and a few homeless guys waiting between shelter shifts. He winds his way down the streets, heading toward Little Saigon.

He goes a little further south than he needs to, though, to check out the PPH.

The fog is rolling in heavy today, and it seems to sit stubbornly right around the base of the building. Pacific Psychiatric Hospital, grounded and towering up the hill, surrounded by stiff-spined trees, imposing in its red-bricked glory, and oozing a sick sense of wrong.

Not always, but for a while, at least.

Castiel glares suspiciously up at the building, as though he could will it to give up its secrets through the power of his disapproval. It doesn’t reveal anything.

Kevin noticed it first, actually. He’d gone up to the International District to hit the Goodwill and came back to Castiel’s apartment shaking and shocky. Ten minutes of frankly out-of-character soothing from a very alarmed Castiel later, Kevin was able to finally tell him that there was _something wrong with that creepy-ass hospital._

Problem was, you couldn’t get into PPH on any kind of flimsy pretext, and there wasn’t enough info to really warrant an investigation and potential trouble with the cops. Not when there was plenty of other shit in the Emerald City to keep him busy as fuck. So the PPH remained at the bottom of his list.

But it was still on his list.

Today the _wrong_ was trickling out slowly, pooling around Castiel’s ankles like the fog pooled around the base of the hospital. It prodded at him, teasingly, as though to say _come and find me_.

“Fuck whatever you are,” Castiel said through gritted teeth as he pushed aside the shivers that tried to wrack his body.

His research had given little to go on. It was a pretty normal hospital, one of many in the city, just kind of auspiciously and eerily perched on top of a hill. He couldn’t find leylines nearby that would give it any kind of malicious aura, or any unusual history--suspicious deaths, infamous patients, nothing. Hell, there isn’t even anything _underneath_ it. In _Seattle_. If anything, it’s suspiciously _normal_ in its construction.

Castiel whispers a warding against evil under his breath and the tingling around his feet dissipates--no, it retracts, quickly, like it’s been burned.

Castiel smiles, sharp and humorless.

He peers up at the hospital one more time.

He gives it the bird as he stalks off, because fuck him if the fucking PPH is going to get in between him and his pho.

 

* * *

 

It’s almost eight o’clock before the shit hits the fan.

It’s been dark for a while now. There’s starting to be a bite in the air, and Dean knows it’s only going to get dark earlier and earlier now, which is kind of a bummer when you’re working second shift. By December, he’ll have maybe two hours between getting on shift and sunset. He prefers the longer days of summer. People are nicer in the daylight. They like cops more. They’re less shifty.

But police work has to be done in the fall just like it does in the summer.

Charlie doesn’t seem to mind as much. It’s not a conversation they’ve had, but she’s not really much for the sun even during bright summer days. Could have something to do with her being pale as a damn vampire, but Dean doesn’t like to make assumptions.

She’s a few feet away, giving an older woman directions back toward the waterfront. The little old lady thanks her and pats her on the forearm. Charlie smiles brightly and waves as she leaves.

Dean rejoins her, propping one hand on his radio hooked onto his belt. “The kind of police work Gilda’s happy with,” he says.

Charlie shoves him with her shoulder. “She _worries_.”

“She’d worry less if it were you giving old ladies directions all day.”

“Not untrue,” Charlie sighs. “Hell, I’d be okay with that. Want to head south?”

Dean shrugs.

There’s a stillness hanging over the city as they drive, one that Dean doesn’t associate with the _q_ word but rather with the impending absence of the _q_ word. A sense of _wait for it_. An intake of breath, slow and deliberate.

He glances south, towards the PPH.

Sam never liked for him to talk about getting weird feelings. And Dean doesn’t mean it in a premonition sort of way--just that he believes that everyone can sense when something bad’s going to go down. Nothing special. Just...man, what’s that word…

“The pheromone thing that’s not a pheromone thing where fish know that there’s danger when one of the school gets hurt,” Dean says abruptly, snapping his fingers by Charlie’s face.

Charlie gives him massive side-eye.

“They talked about it on the radio a couple days ago.”

“Oh. Schreckstoff,” Charlie answers, easy now like she wasn’t staring at him like he’d grown another head two seconds ago.

“Schreckstoff,” Dean repeats.

“You got the willies, Winchester? You’re not picking it up from me.”

“Nah, it’s not that. I don’t know. Probably just the change in the weather.”

He glances south again.

Charlie shifts in her seat and he doesn’t look over.

“Sam needs his time,” she says. “That kid is never gonna stop needing you, and one day he’ll be ready again.”

“Four years,” Dean mutters.

“He’s got real good doctors there. They’re all doing their best, and so is Sam.”

Dean’s knuckles turn white as he grips the steering wheel.

Charlie gets quiet.

“I need…” Dean begins.

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

“I need us to not, right now.”

“Yeah.”

Dean sighs heavily.

“Look, Charlie, I know that--”

“ _Christ_ , Dean!”

Charlie’s arm flies in front of Dean and grabs the steering wheel, jerking it to the right. Dean's eyes swim with the speed of the turn, and it's all he can do not to grab the wheel back, overcorrect, flip the car. As it is, the car jumps the curb on its right-side tires, and Dean slams on the brakes.

They come to a stop with a lurch, and Dean gasps in breath. He stares at the tree that coalesces in his vision, solid and spindly and  _inches_ from the front bumper.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes.

Charlie’s already unbuckling, and she’s out of the car before Dean’s heart rate has slowed enough that he’s convinced he’s not about to have a cardiac episode. Once he can breathe, he throws his seatbelt off and follows her out. His legs are steadier than he'd expected, still less steady than he'd hoped.

Charlie’s stopped in front of the car, and gestures for him to stop when he comes up behind her.

“Charlie, what the fuck--”

“Over there.”

She points to the left, where there’s a man twitching, twitching, before he goes still. Standing in the middle of the road, then walking to the opposite sidewalk. He stops just outside of the pool of light cast by the streetlight.

His head tilts to the side.

Dean _shudders_.

He puts his hand on his weapon and he takes a step forward before Charlie grabs him by the arm and steps in front of him.

“Behavioral crisis,” Charlie murmurs. “We need to call for CIT backup.”

Dean’s fingers tighten around the grip of his pistol. The man still hasn't moved again, not since his head tilted. Behavioral crisis, _hell_. This is not something that the Crisis Intervention Team is gonna be able to manage.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

Charlie looks up at him sharply, her eyes narrowed.

“Dean. Come _on_. He’s obviously either on something or in the middle of a mental health crisis. We have to call for CIT. You can’t just engage this guy, he’s gonna go apeshit.”

“You gotta trust me, Charlie,” Dean says, stepping out from around her grip. “I know what this is and the CIT can’t handle it.”

He goes one more step and his fingers unsnap the holster and Charlie walks in front of him, her arms crossed but her face pale.

“This is not worth your badge, or your life,” she spits. “It’s not worth you having to kill that man. Put your gun _and_ your dick away and get back in the car until we can get CIT out here.”

Dean grits his teeth and checks the guy out of the corner of his eye. Stillness. A weird stillness, getting weirder with every moment it continues.

“I need you to listen to me, Charlie--”

“I need you to get in the _fucking_ car. He’s disorderly at worst. Not. Worth it.”

The worst part, the damndest part of the thing is that she’s _right_. For right now. The guy’s not doing anything, he’s just standing there after he finished twitching, and it’s just that Dean knows that he’s nothing that fucking CIT can fix with some meds and an involuntary psych referral. It’s just that Dean knows that if this guy gets into the hospital, it’s going to mean dead nurses.

The coolness of his gun beneath his fingers is usually a reassurance to him in situations like this, situations that might escalate. If he has to, he can take care of himself. He can protect himself and Charlie can protect herself. But the man’s head is moving now, turning towards him, and it’s languid and sinuous, and he wonders if his gun will do a goddamned thing this time.

He doesn’t refasten the holster snap. He doesn’t take his hand off of his weapon. But he pushes past Charlie, who is hissing at him to think about his job and to _think about Sam, for fuck’s sake_ , but he ignores her.

“Hey, buddy!” he shouts, and the guy doesn’t really react, not much. Not like some poor idiot who’s on a bad trip would. Not like a guy in the middle of some mental breakdown would. He just tilts his head back somewhat, like he’s peering down at Dean down his nose.

Dean slips his gun out just enough to have a good hold on the grip.

“SPD,” he calls, his voice clear and as calm as he can manage. “Just want to talk. You need some help there, pal?”

The guy looks at him then, dead-on, eye-to-eye and it’s the shadows, it’s _got_ to be the shadows, but his eyes look completely black.

Dean clicks the safety off.

“Oh _yes_ , officer,” the guy says, and Dean freezes.

He interacts with a _lot_ of people who are not at their best on this beat. Lots of coke, lots of booze, lots of everything. Lots of brain chemistry that should have them on a totally different set of chemicals. He very, very rarely hears the kind of clarity and diction he hears now.

“I need _help_.”

Dean’s world narrows into a very fine focus. The guy is moving towards him now.

Dean draws his gun.

“Stay back,” he shouts.

His finger is steady on the trigger but that's only years of practice keeping it that way. This guy, he's  _wrong_ , there's something  _wrong_ about him in  _that way_ and Dean wants salt and iron but all he has is his police-issue side arm. He hopes that holding it like this, like he might use it, because he  _might use it_ , will be enough that he won't have to.

The guy keeps coming.

“You said you’d _help_ me, officer,” the guy simpers. “Is that the kind of hospitality the SPD offers? Come on. I need _help_.”

Charlie’s beside him, all of a sudden, her weapon drawn, too.

“We need you to keep your distance, sir,” she calls. Her voice is steady and even and everything that Dean isn't feeling right now, and he breathes a little easier for her solidity. “Show us your hands.”

The guy does.

Then one flicks towards them, and Charlie is launched back against the car, landing with a crash and a cry of pain.

She is  _launched_. She  _flies_ against it. In his sharp glance to her Dean sees crimson on the pavement and he knows she's bleeding, knows she's hurt, and there's nothing logical or explicable about what just happened but Charlie is on the ground and he is the only thing between this guy and either a second swipe at Charlie or the general public.

“Charlie!” Dean shouts, then turns back to the guy--the _assailant_ , now. “Stop right there! Get on the fucking ground!”

“I was complying, officer,” the assailant says. “She asked for my hands.”

He’s under a streetlight now. And his eyes are still black. And Charlie is laying crumpled against the car, hugging her leg to her in a way that does not spell backup.

“I said get on the _fucking ground_! I _will_ shoot you!”

The assailant fucking _laughs_.

Dean’s world is now his target, his weapon, and his trigger finger.

He fires three shots, precisely aimed, clustered right over the assailant’s heart.

When the world expands again, the assailant is standing under the streetlight, examining his ruined clothes like one might after spilling something at a restaurant.

He won’t admit until later how much it scares him. How cold his blood runs, how he feels the edges of his vision go dark like it’s him bleeding out on the old brick street instead of this--whatever he is.

He won’t question until later why he doesn’t call for backup, why instead when the assailant turns around and starts to dart through the buildings, he barrels after him.

He does question, close to immediately, how in the _fuck_ he didn’t notice the civilian just _standing_ there.

 

* * *

 

Castiel’s in a weird part of town. It’s all a weird part of town: hell, it’s Seattle. Someone told him once they built the current city on top of the old city- just constructed the streets and the buildings right on top of what used to be there. Place like that is gonna be weird. Not in that cute, affected _Keep Portland Weird_ kind of weird; actual _weird_. Dangerous weird. Kind of place with energy that will sustain it when the college kids go and the computers leave and the microbreweries pack up and go too. Kind of energy that kept it here after the war. Kind of energy that will keep this city here until Earth shuts the door; packs up and leaves.

It didn’t seem this weird when he lived out on the island with Mother and Father and his brothers. It all seemed so...so normal. Sometimes he wonders what would have happened if he’d just shut the fuck up, if he hadn’t been bucking for the fight or for blood.

Who would he _be_? Some accountant with a wife and a kid? Who would _Gabriel_ be?

Who would _Michael_ have been?

He rounds a corner, it’s there.

That feeling that’s been in his teeth like someone’s been tugging at his molars with a cord fifty feet away, that hangnail sensation, that-- _fuck_ , it’s like feeling a photic sneeze threaten in his sinuses. That feeling explodes over him, and he knows he’s on the right track. On the right street, at the very least.

And then he sees the guy. He sees the way reality crackles around the guy, like small lightning. He sees the look in his eye, the hold of his body.

Anyone can see a possession from the eyes, but Castiel knows it from the shape of the shoulders. It’s like looking at a big cat, coiled tensely before leaping toward prey.

“What’s your name?” he murmurs. It doesn’t react. Can’t hear him from there. Might not even know he’s looking yet. He steps forward, and then he hears an incredible noise.

He walks a little more forward.

“Give me your name,” he says.

A guy comes around a corner--a cop in uniform.

Castiel hangs back.

Cop approaches--moves forward with his gun in hand. Castiel’s can’t see his face from this distance or this angle, but his body expression is taut in the way that only a young guy’s body can be taut. Proud. Thinks he’s a damn sight more powerful than he actually is.

Castiel can hear the vibration of his voice but he can’t make out what he’s saying. He can hear the tone, the shape of it. Stern and sharp but _desperate_. Trying to get him to back off. He’s angry, but not at the guy here. No, this is different. And this is dangerous.

Castiel hangs back.

Woman comes around the corner, too. Red hair, inches shorter than her partner and the demon. Her gun is drawn, too.

Castiel doesn’t really hear the voice, so much. He hears the way it wounds the air around it and tries to tear into the people nearby. The voice of the thing is an invitation for more of its ilk. Makes Castiel want to take a hot shower.

And then it charges them.

It’s sudden. It’s brief, and then the woman is on the ground and cop is shouting and the demon keeps at it--keeps needling at him.

Three shots, _pop pop pop,_ and Castiel doesn’t have to be close to guess the look of horror that’s definitely coming over the young cop’s face as the demon laughs it off.

And then the demon is running and the cop looks at the partner and then the cop is running and _fuck_.

Castiel darts forward, toward the guy, and he tackles him, pressing him into the wall, actually getting a look at him for the first time. He grabs the jackass’s shirt in big handfuls, hearing the way the seams rip at the shoulders.

“What the _fuck_ is your problem?” he shouts at him, thrusting him up against a wall. “Do you think this is a _game_?”

Jackass looks at him with a heavily furrowed brow, his shoulders bunching around his head as Castiel presses him against the wall. He looks down the alley where the demon went, and tries to shrug out of Castiel’s grip. “Get the _fuck_ off me,” he growls.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Castiel retorts.

Jackass stares at him, wide-eyed, the adrenaline all but tangible in the pulse near Castiel’s hands, taken aback by his lack of obedience. “I’m _police_ ,” he starts.

Castiel slams him against the wall again. “Do you think he gives a granular _fuck_ if you’re a cop?”

“He’s breaking the law!” Jackass shouts at him.

“He’s outside your jurisdiction, then!” Castiel replies. “Go home! Fuck off! This isn’t some sort of fucking--” He lets go of him. He glares at him.

“It’s assault on an officer, he hurt my _partner_ \--”

Castiel gestures sharply: _my fucking point_. “Right, so fuck off. She needs help--missed her fucking artery but _barely_.”

Jackass looks at him, and Castiel finally sees the fire in him that probably makes him an alright cop. He sees him gather his bluster, getting ready to tear Cas a new one, when Castiel _really_ screws with him and walks away.

He learned this as a teenager. Nothing takes the wind out of these guys’ sails like just _walking away_ from them. And if the guy has an authoritarian bent (what pig _doesn’t_ ), this’ll probably fuck him up nice. It’s not enough that this jackass thinks he has authority here, it’s that he thinks he has more authority than _Castiel_. Castiel is _Mister Authority_ when it comes to this shit. Hard pressed to find more authoritative fucks in this place than him.

He’s just rounded the corner when he hears the cop begin to sputter, and Castiel smirks. He ducks his hand into his coat and fishes out a cigarette. Slips it into his mouth and lights it quickly, sucks it right down. He’ll need to be done with it before he goes into the hotel, and god knows when this shit’ll all be done and he can afford to dodge out and grab another.

Let the cops come and clean up once it just looks like a drug overdose, when it’s just lives and not fucking _souls_.

He jogs toward where the demon went--a thing like that is playing. Wants to get caught; wants to get found. It’s not interested in getting lost; that’s not the way these things _work_. It wants to crow. Wants to show off, prove he’s a big man.

Castiel barely has to jog a mile before he finds the thing, poised under a streetlight. It looks _gleeful_.

“Little angel, far from home,” it intones. It speaks the rough, rocky tones of Enochian. The sound brings goosebumps across Castiel’s arms. It says something he doesn’t quite catch--he only really knows the insults and the words for banishments. He hears the shape of the word for _little_ though. And _pitiful_.

“ _Give me your name_ ,” he says. The streetlight pops.

It snickers again.

Castiel begins to _pray_.

There is a terror of sound. Suddenly the street sound empty and dark; like a cave in the very bowels of nowhere. Of no place. It does not stop and it does not change. The sound is. The sound is terrible.

Castiel feels the Enochian rumble of banishment fall from his lips, unbidden, unrequested. Natural. Easy. As easy as this thing is for him, written down deep into his blood at this point.

The figure before him collapses. The lights around him flicker back on.

He pulls a stick of chalk out of his pocket and draws a circle around the light. At the top and bottom of it, he draws two little lines, attaching it to the earth. It won’t contain the guy when he wakes up, but it’ll stop the evicted tenant from coming back in while Castiel makes a phone call.

He walks two blocks over, to a payphone, and calls 911. An ambulance will show up in a few and find the guy, who by all accounts just _blacked out_. And maybe the cops will find him. Maybe they won’t.

Castiel hopes they don’t. Guy’s had a shit day as it is.

The uneasy feeling ebbs a little bit, but it doesn’t go away.

He stands there, in the city, in the dark, until he hears the ambulance, and then the voices of people stumbling away from a restaurant.

His stomach growls.

“Pho,” he says, remembering.

Like on cue, his phone buzzes in his pocket.

 

* * *

 

See, the problem is that his fucking bosses want to know _who was it_?

Dean sits in the waiting room of the ER with his CO. Gilda’s in the room with Charlie. He’s not family, so they didn’t let him in.

Gilda had rushed into the ER, and Dean had flinched when he saw her. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t Gilda coming up to him and dropping down to a crouch in front of him, one hand on his knee and the other on his face.

“She’s going to be okay,” Gilda said firmly, like she could make it so just by saying it. Gilda’s like that. Unshakeable. She’s eerie with it. “Are _you_ okay?”

Dean hadn’t trusted himself to speak, not in the face of the unexpected gentleness, so he just nodded. Gilda smiled wearily, pressed some kind of sweet pastry he’d probably make fun of under other circumstances into the palm of his hand, and swept away with a nurse to where Charlie was.

That just left him and Lt. Benjamin Lafitte--Benny when they were off the clock. And Benny is extremely fucking patient.

“I don’t fucking know,” Dean mutters. The clock on the wall is driving him insane. “I don’t, Boss. Thought it was just--Charlie, she thought it was some skell, you know? Behavioral crisis.”

“You disagreed,” Benny says.

“A feeling,” Dean replies. “Just--an instinct.”

Benny waits.

Benny’s a big guy--broad not just through the shoulders but through the whole body of him. His arms are crossed over his chest. His gaze is level.

Dean sighs heavily, scrubbing his face with his hands. “Look, Boss, I gave the best description I could. It wasn’t somebody we knew. I’d never seen him around before.”

“You said Bradbury thought the suspect was in the middle of a behavioral crisis,” Benny says, and Dean feels his stomach clench. “She didn’t recommend calling CIT?”

“She did,” Dean admits. “I didn’t think it was a behavioral crisis, sir. I had a bad feeling.”

“So you engaged.”

“I called him, said I was SPD, asked if he needed help. He approached, and wouldn’t stop approaching when I told him to. I drew my weapon. Boss, I’ve already _told_ you all of this.”

“You not calling CIT might have ended up with Bradbury in that bed,” Benny says--no. Lt. Lafitte says. His eyes are hard and his jaw is set. “And you haven’t explained to me how this perp--this asshole that Bradbury thought was some junkie--managed to get past you to throw her across the street and against your fucking squad car.”

“He was...he was strong, sir. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“And you called for backup and attended to your partner.”

Dean swallows.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then when did he grab you?”

Dean contains his flinch.

“Sir?”

Lt. Lafitte grabs his uniform shirt and sticks his fingers into the tear in his right shoulder seam. “The perp must’ve gotten his hands on you. Or did you tear your own shirt? Wailing and gnashing your teeth wasn’t good enough?”

Dean doesn’t pull away. That hadn’t been part of his report. But with Lafitte breathing down his neck like this, he doesn’t have a lot of choice.

“A civilian,” Dean says. “Grabbed me. I was going after the suspect and this guy tackles me, grabs me, says that it’s out of my jurisdiction.”

“Out of your--who the fuck was he?” Lafitte demands, releasing him.

Dean shakes his head.

“I don’t know. He held me there and then he walked away. I would’ve gone after him--but Charlie, she was bleeding. I knew it was bad. I couldn’t leave her.”

“You’re telling me you let the suspect _and_ the guy who interfered with your pursuit of the suspect, you let them both go, easy as that.”

Dean sets his jaw. “I had Charlie to think about, sir.”

Lafitte watches him through narrow eyes.

“You’re not telling me everything, Winchester. You ought to reconsider that, or I’ll have you on desk duty for the rest of your fucking life. You discharged your weapon tonight and I don’t have shit to show for that, not even blood. When Bradbury wakes up, you better hope she substantiates your story.”

Dean nods. He doesn’t have any fight in him, nothing to come at his CO with, because he fucked up. He engaged with that perp when Charlie told him not to, and now she’s in a fucking hospital bed because of it.

“Yes, sir,” he says, quiet.

Lafitte blows out an aggravated breath, and he stands up.

“Sir?” Dean says.

Lafitte glares.

“They haven’t found him yet?”

“What, your mystery superpowered unsub? No, Winchester, they haven’t found him.”

Dean nods. “Do you need me down at the station?”

“Like hell.” Lafitte’s eyes soften a little, and he shakes his head. “Go the fuck to sleep, Winchester. There’s plenty of time tomorrow for me to shake this shit out of you.”

Benny’s a transplant to the Northwest like Dean is; he’s from a parish in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana. Bayou kinda guy. His accent isn't as apparent as it was when Dean first met him, but it's still there sometimes, especially when he's angry or frustrated. He's a good guy. Brews beer in his basement and listens to loud zydeco. Takes care of his officers as much as he can, as long as they haven’t fucked up too bad.

Dean hopes he hasn’t fucked up too bad.

An hour later, the nurse comes out and says Charlie can see him. She’s stabilized, she’s going to be okay. Her leg’s not even broken, just banged up real good, and there’s a nasty gash close to but not across her femoral artery.

Just like the guy said. Dean ignores a little tremor that goes down his spine at that. He’d just gotten a better look at Charlie than Dean had, _somehow_. That’s _all_. This is not the freaky part of this happening; this isn’t the part that has his rosary wrapped so tight around his fist that the beads are biting into his knuckles, leaving little red indentations.

Gilda squeezes his shoulder and he smiles at her, smiles at Charlie, says something that’s flippant but not quite flippant enough to fool either of them. It’s okay. Once he sees Charlie’s eyes open and rolling at him, once he hears her voice tell him to stop being an idiot and that it wasn’t his fault, he can go.

He can leave, and find the soon to be _very sorry_ asshole who hurt his partner. And, if he’s lucky, the asshole who’d let him get away in the first place.


	3. Chapter 3

Kevin looks at him over the top of the table and says, “You seriously don’t see any problem with this?”

Castiel looks up at him. Raises an eyebrow. He takes the thick, red chopsticks in one hand and the spoon in another, pokes around in the soup. “Kevin, I like Vietnamese food,” he says. “Pho, specifically. I know that you and your family are not connected to this restaurant. We’re not here for your comfort. Calm down.”

Kevin Tran doesn’t look impressed, but it’s better than Kevin looking panicked. “So what was it?” He asks.

Castiel slurps a mouthful of noodles and broth. “Black eyes,” he says. “Demon. Gabriel’s lead was right- you two did good letting me know.” He fishes around for a piece of tendon and he chews on it, contemplatively.

“Is the guy okay?” Kevin asks, his brown eyes going wide. Concerned.

Castiel nods. “Ambulance came and took him to a hospital. He’ll wake up in six or seven hours and Anna will slip him Gabriel’s card. Same as it ever was, Kevin.” He looks down at the plate of garnishes and add ons for a moment, and then dumps a handful of cilantro and chilis in. Lime quarter gets squirted over the top. “You didn’t tell the police, did you?”  
Kevin looks at him like he just grew a second head.

“Two cops,” Castiel says, messily. “One got fucked up. Other wanted to rumble with the demon.”

“I thought you said everyone was alright!” Kevin hisses from across the table. He’s not stuttering, which is good. Still not panicked or anxious, just irate.

“She’s going to be fine,” Castiel says. “She got to a hospital; the fucker didn’t get any arteries. Her partner seemed concerned once he put the testosterone away, which means he probably applied pressure. She’ll probably get a nice scar out of it; pick up young guns at bars with it.”

Kevin looks neither amused nor comforted, just kind upset. “Cas,” he says, “what if-”

“Nothing did, though,” Castiel says, his mouth full of top round. “Dwell on those what-ifs and you’ll need to graduate to someone more competent than Gabriel.”

Kevin rolls his eyes. “Next time, we’re meeting at the pub down the block,” he murmurs darkly.

“I’m not Irish, you racist fuck,” Castiel laughs, and Kevin flips him off.

Kid will be fine.

The waitress brings a plate of spring rolls, wrapped in rice paper. Castiel smiles at her, and she smiles back. He’s damn near regular here. Not enough that they know his name, but enough that they know he always pays in cash and he wants an order of spring rolls midway through his soup, if for no other reason than Kevin inevitably steals two of them, and that kid needs to eat more than he does. God knows, Linda’s trying.

Sure enough, Kevin steals a spring roll and takes a bite, the bean sprouts crunching under his teeth. Castiel wishes he could get him to eat some of the beef- since it all happened, kid’s been put off meat in a big way.

“Don’t you have school tomorrow?” Castiel asks.

The blood drains from Kevin’s face. “Shit,” he hisses. “I need to get home. I’ve got calculus to do.”

Castiel fishes his wallet out of his pocket and lays a twenty down on the table. His check is only going to be thirteen dollars or so, but he likes to tip. It makes him feel good.

A twitch ghosts over Kevin’s face, and he fishes his phone out of pocket.

“You got bus fare?” Castiel ask, and Kevin nods vigorously. He takes another spring roll. Castiel grabs the last two, and they walk out of the restaurant.

-

Dean’s just out. Downtown, in the dark, near where it happened but maybe eight to ten blocks away. There are a couple of alright bars in the area, and there’s nothing Dean wants as much as a drink. Cheap whiskey, preferably, and then maybe a stranger whose name he won’t remember and whose face he’ll barely recall. He’s even considering tucking his badge away, invisible, so he can cheat at pool .

That’s when he sees them.

It’s that asshole. He’s in a little hole-in-the-wall pho joint with a kid, and he looks a little relaxed, but it’s definitely the same guy. Same dark, messy hair and studied, intense features. Even relaxed, he holds himself in the same way- same curve to his shoulders, straightness to his spine. He’s wearing the same clothes.

Dean stands in front of the restaurant and watches the guy as he says his quick good-byes to the kid, who is pretty enthralled with his phone and seems to mutter something without looking up. The guy looks about as amused as Dean would be, and he ducks back behind the restaurant.

Dean curses and tries to follow, but the asshole slips out of his sight. Of fucking course he’d lose him--of course he’d melt into the darkness like some kind of goddamned poor man’s Houdini.

But the kid sticks around.

Calling an Uber or something, probably. He looks about seventeen, stick-skinny with a messy mop of dark hair. Full of twitchy, anxious little movements, checking over his shoulder like he knows he’s being watched, or like he’s worried he might be. And yeah, not a bad idea at this time of night, even if Seattle’s a pretty safe city on the whole. And after all, the kid is being watched. But there’s something timid in it, something once-bitten-twice-shy. Something that makes Dean a little sad.

His fingers race over his phone. A shiver wracks his frame. It’s getting chilly but it’s not that cold. Still, the kid’s wearing skinny jeans and a hoodie. It’s not like he’s got much insulation.

Kind of reminds Dean of Sam in high school.

That’s a thought that he shoves aside real quick, and he shakes off the ensuing pang of loneliness as he walks up to the kid. His badge is nice and visible, and he’s wearing an SPD jacket. He couldn’t be more conspicuously a cop if he was wearing his uniform. Which he might have still been wearing, if the kid's asshole friend hadn't torn it.

He pastes on a smile he knows for a fact is convincing, and his hands are open and carefully displayed when he walks up. No need to escalate a situation needlessly. Benny will have his ass gorilla-glued to a desk for eternity if he fucks up again, whether or not there was a body (or hell, even a complainant) connected to his last screw-up. So with this kid, he is going to be the definition of solicitous.

Which is why he’s a little surprised as the kid’s expression becomes one of dawning horror when he calls out, “Hey, pal, you got a minute?”

The phone disappears into the kid’s pocket, and he sticks his hands in, too, then draws them out quickly. Then he shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets before pulling them out of those, too.

The whole thing is mildly comical, but Dean puts his hands up. “Woah, didn’t mean to startle you. No trouble, man. Just wondering if you could give me a hand.”

The kid peers at his badge, and looks really pale.

“You p-police?” he asks.

Dean nods. “Yeah. Name’s Winchester. You got a sec?”

There’s a moment where the kid obviously considers lying, but while his lips move for a while, they don’t form around anything useful and eventually he shrugs and nods.

He looks so crestfallen that Dean just wants to pat him on the head. Instead, he grins and peers into the little Vietnamese place they’re standing outside of.

“I guess you just ate, but can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”

“I thought this would j-just take a s-second,” the kid stutters, his shoulders bunching.

“Yeah,” Dean says, easy, shrugging. “But you know, a second of your time and free coffee for your trouble? Sounds like a better deal to me.”

“C-coffee m-makes me anxious,” the kid mutters.

Dean doesn’t snort.

It’s close.

“Then some chamomile tea,” Dean says. “Let me do you a favor, man, it’s cold out. You looking for a ride? Or need bus fare?”

“What the hell,” the kid mumbles, barely loud enough for Dean to hear, and he shoots a pained glance over Dean’s shoulder. Dean looks, too. Nothing there.

Dean waits.

The kid gives him a despairing look and says “Y-yeah, okay, fine. T-tea. I don’t need a r-ride.”

Dean grins and gestures expansively. “Hey, no problem. There’s a place I know a few blocks from here. Let’s head out.”

The kid follows dejectedly behind him as he takes the lead.

“What’s your name?” Dean asks.

It takes a while--the K proves difficult--but Dean is patient and the kid eventually says "Kevin."

“Kevin,” Dean echoes. “Nice to meet you.”

Kevin does not return the sentiment.

-  
  


The coffee house is really mislabeled as such. It’s more of a coffee closet, in fairness. A handful of seats around a big, clunky espresso machine, a few more on what passes for a patio but is really just the parking lot fenced in by some rope. Klezmer music blasts out of the tiny window where orders are given and delivered, and the woman working the register and machines has a way of glaring at everything that puts Dean on edge. But their coffee is strong and hot, there’s an evil eye hanging over the window, and they have a couple of teas that Sammy--

Well. Their tea is okay. So Dean hears, anyway. He doesn’t know much about tea.

Kevin is huddled around his steaming mug of actual chamomile tea (Dean had been joking), peering up at Dean like he thinks he's going to get eaten.

“Look,” Dean says, “I just need your help with one thing. Easy. It’s about the guy you were with at that restaurant.”

Kevin freezes. Dean notes that with some interest, but plows on.

“I think he might’ve witnessed a crime.” Dean keeps his voice real casual. “Might be able to help us ID a suspect. If he did, he could really help the investigation.”

Kevin is already shaking his head by the time Dean finishes talking.

“I d-don’t--I don’t--don’t know him, not really, w-we were there with another friend. Mu-mutual friend. He--I don’t know him.”

Dean doesn’t say anything, just takes a swig of his coffee and stares the kid down.

Kevin swallows hard, then drops his eyes. But he doesn’t talk.

“Your friend--sorry, your mutual friend isn’t in trouble, Kevin. I’m looking for his help. I’m pretty sure I saw him, I just need you to help me get in touch with him. You’re not pointing the finger at him, nothing like that. I just need him to help me find a bad guy, all right?”

Kevin snorts, and Dean grants him that. Bad guy was perhaps laying it on thick. But it got a reaction out of him, so maybe not a total loss.

Kevin twists his napkin in his fingers. There’s a lot of force behind that motion.

“I w-wish I could help you,” he says. His voice is low and worried. Hell, worry oozes out of every word and action and gesture of this kid. Not that kind of worry that’s unwarranted, though. Experienced worry.

Dean sits back in his seat, holds the paper coffee cup between his hands.

“I do,” Kevin says.

Dean takes another sip of coffee, while Kevin squirms. After a while, Dean sighs.

“This guy I’m looking for. Not your buddy--the guy he can help me find. He hurt my partner, Kevin. Hurt her real bad. She’s in the hospital. Her leg’s all fucked up. This guy assaulted a police officer. And my partner, she’s a good cop. The kind you don’t read about, you know? Helps old ladies across the street. He tried to kill her. You help me find your friend, your friend helps me find the perp, boom. Justice is served. Think you can do that for me, Kevin?”

Kevin sinks further into his seat.

Dean leans forward. “Kevin. Can you help me find the man who tried to kill my partner?”

Kevin takes in a breath, and Dean does the same.

And then the kid’s jaw sets.

“Am I under arrest, officer?” Kevin asks, his voice barely audible, but firm and careful and absolute. His eyes are fixed firmly on the cooling mug of tea in front of him.

Dean stares at him for a long time.

“No,” he bites out. “You’re not under fucking arrest.”

Kevin abandons his tea and flees, leaving Dean sitting on the shitty little fake patio, wondering what in every possible fuck just happened.

-

Sam sits in his room and looks at the blank white walls and he feels strange.

Sam feeling “strange” isn’t anything new or unusual, really. It’s a different kind of strange, though. He feels his guts clenching, he feels tightly wound and unsteady. He stands up, and goes before the door of his room. He’s not sure why he’s standing there, what he’s doing there.

It opens suddenly, and he jumps.

“C’mon, Sammy, you’re gonna be late for school,” Dean says.

Dean is his older brother; dirty blonde hair and green eyes and an open, teasing face. Never taking anything seriously except he’s taking everything seriously. Deadly seriously. Painfully seriously.

Sam looks behind him.

White walls, cot bed. Empty bookshelf, screwed to the wall. Blinds drawn on high windows.

He looks in front of him. Dean, about twenty, stands in the doorway. The institution hallway stretches forward.

Sam looks at his brother.

“Sammy?” Dean asks.

Sam wakes up in his bed, sheets sticking to his body with sweat.

He’s in his real room, not in that white one that’s arranged all wrong. And he’s late for school.

Dean opens his door and says, “Sammy! C’mon, get dressed!”

Sam frowns. “It’s Sam,” he says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Whatever. I’ll give you a ride, you’ve already missed the bus.”

Sam rolls out of bed and puts on his clothes and runs his hands through his hair and grabs a bagel from on top of the fridge and climbs into Dean’s car.

Dean loves his car. It was Dad’s once, when Dad was still alive. Dean repaired it himself, though, and she runs better than Sam ever remembers her running under Dad’s stewardship. A song comes on the radio and Dean turns it up- something long and hard to hear. He doesn’t know the name of it, but he’s never been interested in the music that Dean likes. Dean learned music from Dad, and thinking about Dad, it leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

Dean’s driving, the song playing. Sam takes a bite of the bagel and he looks over at his brother.

His brother’s eyes turn black, and he smiles.

Sam wakes up again, this time in the institution again.

-

“Cas,” he says, “Cas- Cas-Cassie-Cas- Cas, it’s not that I don’t treasure these talks but I have to go, I have work, you irritable fuck.” He pauses, Castiel berating him further on the other end of the line. “Okay. Okay. I’ll-I’ll-” He hangs up. Castiel’s invested in yelling at him more on the other line, but he really is running late. The agency has him set up with a new hospital and he’s meeting up with a couple of new patients today and he can’t be far off schedule. Schedules make these places, run them from dusk until dawn and if he’s off schedule he’s fucking up everything for everyone and he-

He dashes through the door, out of breath. Shows his ID to the security desk and walks quickly to the little multi-use office they have him in.

The patient is already in there.

Gabriel’s already had a chance to look at the file for the guy. Paranoid schizophrenia with religious delusions. It’s what Gabriel’s good at, even without all the freaky rigamarole, and hey, everyone’s got talents. Been here for a few years now but generally doesn’t participate in group or solo therapy. Barely leaves his room, and getting him to talk is a miracle in and of itself.

On the couch, in the faded blue clothes of the hospital, he looks tired. His hair is overlong, like it hasn’t even been trimmed in years. Four of them, if the file is right. His head is crooked downward. No eye contact.

“Hi,” Gabriel says. “Sorry. Late. Never been on time for anything a day in my life. It’s one of my special talents.”

The guy doesn’t say anything. The guy doesn’t move.

The nurse who’s been waiting with him nods to Gabriel, and then slips out of the room, leaving him alone with his patient.

Yeah, all right.

“I’m Gabriel,” he says, settling into the seat across from the patient. “Just Gabriel. Some of the other guys, the like the titles and shit but I’m uh...I’m just Gabriel. And you’re Sammy, right?”

“Sam,” the guy answers. His voice is hoarse. His eyes don’t quite make it up to Gabriel’s face, but there’s a shift in them--a break in that flat affect.

Gabriel raises an eyebrow, jotting that down.

“Just Sam and Just Gabriel, then,” he says. “What’s up, Sam?”

Sam’s eyes shutter again, and his shoulders relax. He draws inward, and Gabriel can see the walls come up. It’s nothing that surprises him. Four years, barely a word, he knows he’s not going to make any kind of radical breakthrough today. He’s here to observe. To poke and prod, maybe, and see what reactions he can get.

This guy, this Sam, he’s a career-killer. Gabriel has seen the file. He’s seen the number of therapists who gave up, who left, left the field after working with Sam. Which doesn’t mesh, it doesn’t, with this quiet, withdrawn kid (and does Gabriel mean kid- he just turned 26 in May). Because Gabriel gets frustration, sure. But not being able to crack a patient--even a fascinating one like Sam--that doesn’t make you retire to Hawaii to teach middle schoolers. So there’s something beneath this veneer, despite the fact that all of his caregivers say that he’s a model patient. He’s not violent (anymore), he’s polite (in the rare moments where he talks), he’s compliant (for the most part). He doesn’t request anything other than the occasional textbook or addition to his room- opaque blinds and mirrors removed. Kid wants to be there. Wants to take his meds, wants to be allowed to stay.

What he doesn’t seem to want, though, is to get better. He’s stubbornly silent in talk therapy, and unless he’s drug-seeking, which would be odd given that the kid isn’t being given the fun stuff, Gabriel can’t figure why he’d prefer to be drugged to the gills rather than seeing if maybe talking through his problems could help.

Except that his current program is really best maintained in an inpatient setting. Sam’s never been cleared to go home.

Which maybe says more about home than it does about the quality room service at PPH.

“They still serve that butterscotch pudding here?” he asks.

Sam looks up at him, raises an eyebrow.

“The really dark kind? You can’t really call that color brown and it’s not really yellow either,” he says. “When I was here, they served it maybe once or twice a week. I don’t really miss the food here or anything, but I tell you what, that pudding’s good shit.”

Sam looks back down.

He’s curious, Gabriel can tell. It’s a good anecdote for places like this, even if it’s not always true in the strictest sense. Sure, he spent a few weeks here but not at every institution in King county. But nothing makes them want to know more about you than thinking that you were one of them.

And it really was excellent pudding.

Sam shakes his head. “Haven’t seen it,” he answers.

Gabriel shakes his own head. “Damn,” he murmurs. “I was hoping I could swing by the kitchen and see if I could sweet talk a cook after this.”

Sam doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t really move. He just sits there, leaning so that his elbows rest on his knees and his lower body points downward. Hidden. And the thing is, he's a big guy. Six four and broad through the shoulders. He's not bulky, though, not like his frame is shaped to be. He's lean in an uncanny way. Makes him look fragile. And with the way he holds himself, it looks intentional. The whole thing screams no _t a threat not a threat not a threat._

Kid stays quiet for fifteen minutes before saying, "I didn't think they'd let former patients work here."

 _Baited_.

"They're all about the people coming back, trying to help," he answers. "Granted, I'm unorthodox, but my own therapist was very encouraging."

"Therapist seeks therapist," Sam murmurs.

Gabriel huffs a short laugh. "It's less uncommon than you think it might be. And I don't talk about the job during my sessions." He pauses, a long moment. "Even therapists need someone to talk to sometimes.”

Sam looks at him.

God, he looks weary.

“Try hard,” he says, his voice flat-toned.

Gabriel shrugs. “Way I see it, I get paid for being here whether you talk to me or not. Might be more interesting for the two of us if you do talk to me.”

The kid doesn’t say anything for the rest of the hour- the remaining forty minutes of it. But it finishes and Gabriel says, “I’ll see you, same time, same place in a week, kiddo.”

A nurse comes in and takes Sam by the arm, and the kid unfolds meekly and walks out of the room, leaving Gabriel sitting in the armchair under the lamp, looking at the door.

He sighs heavily and runs his hand over his face. He grabs his travel mug and takes a deep drink of his coffee. He closes his eyes and takes a few deep, steadying breaths. Something feels weird here, and he’s probably just still on edge from what happened yesterday. He hates when his brother gets caught up in the demon shit. There’s not much choice there, granted, but it puts him on edge. He hates the fact that one day, SPD will call him and tell him that his brother is dead in an alleyway. He hates the fact that he knows this with such certainty. And he hates knowing that there’s something out there. That there’s always something out there, something wrong, that he can’t explain.

It’s hard to tell sometimes whether or not what he’s experiencing is him or that other thing. Castiel calls it ESP, but Gabriel hates putting a label to it. He hates calling it anything. Calling it something makes it real makes it a part of him like one of his arms or the anxiety disorder.

There’s an oily sensation to the air here. It’s more than just how this place reminds him of the breakdown; it’s the color of things here. Muted and dull pastels, low florescent lights and daytime tv.

There’s a knock on the door, and then a man in a suit steps into the room. He’s got short, dark hair, beginning to thin at the temples. Wide, slightly bulging eyes. His suit is well tailored, dark with a red tie. He has a clipboard and pen in his hands and slightly expectant, giddy look on his face. There’s something greasy to the guy- maybe it’s the suit, maybe it’s the used-car-salesman smile.

“Mr. Novak, I presume?” He says. He has an British accent, and it makes his voice husky and dark. “A pleasure to meet you- I’m Dr. Fergus Crowley, the director of this particular institution. We’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting, as you were hired by my predecessor-”  
“Raphael left the game?” Gabriel asks, standing to shake his hand. “I had no idea- I figured he’d be here until the end of days.”  
He has a firm handshake. “He transferred to an institution in Florida, I’m told. He grew quite ill of the winters here.”

Gabriel frowns. He’d known Raphael for a long time, and humorless dick that he was, it had never occurred to Gabriel he might have seasonal affective disorder. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. “I was just going to go, actually, I have another appointment across town in an hour or so and traffic is going to be a bitch.”

Dr. Crowley frowns, his face wrinkling ever so slightly downwards. “Please,” he says, “let me at least tell you that I saw your work with the patient, Sam Winchester? On the surveillance screen.”

Gabriel frowns. He knows that these offices are bugged and monitored- it only makes sense for both the patients and the therapists involved- but something about knowing that someone is watching and listening is unsettling and makes him feel wrong.

“Interesting file,” Gabriel says. “Seems like a strange guy.”  
“Please, do not misunderstand my intentions with watching your interaction,” Dr. Crowley says. “You saw that you are the fifth therapist he’s had? We were quite concerned he was going to become violent.”

Gabriel frowns. “There was nothing in his file to indicate that he would be-”  
The doctor smiles, and his grin is knavish and unkind. “Of course there isn’t,” he says. Practically hisses. There’s a mad little glint to his eye. It’s nitrogen-burn cold, the kind of cold so intense it burns. “We’ve run into similar issues, with other files. There are some rather glaring omissions among the violent offend- patients. We should have an amended file to you by next week.”

Gabriel nods, but there’s something wrong here. Kid didn’t seem violent; the kid seemed the furthest thing from violent.

“At any rate,” Dr. Crowley says, “your work is impressive. Do keep it up.”

And he smiles again, and slips out of the office, leaving that uncomfortable, greasy feeling in the air, leaving Gabriel standing there, feeling wrong.

-

It’s too early, because Castiel went to bed and the sun is still down but here he is, awake in his bed, because his phone is ringing like it’s full of three dozen incredibly irate bees.

He squints at the over-bright screen, trying to discern what it says, before he answers and murmurs, “What?”  
“ _C-C-Cas?_ ” Kevin stutters out on the other line.

Stuttering’s back.

“What’s up, Kevin?” Castiel asks.

“ _P-p-police o-o-o-_ ,” his voice cuts off. He inhales, he exhales. “ _Police_ ,” he repeats. “ _Found me. Asked about y-yuh-yuh-you._ ”

“Kevin,” Castiel says, “Kevin, take a deep breath for me, okay? Don’t rush.”

There’s a pause.

“ _Outside the restaurant, he a-a-approached me_ ,” he replies. There’s another pause. “ _He asked about you. He wants to t-talk to you. About what hhhappened._ ” Another, longer pause. “ _He’s going to look for the guy, who got pppossessed._ ”

“Fuck,” Castiel sighs. “Shit. Thank you, Kevin.”

“ _His name_.” Kevin swallows hard enough that Castiel hears it over the line. “ _His n-name. It’s W--Win. Winnnn. W--_ ”

“Breathe. I have time, Kevin.”

_“W--shit. Shit, Cas. The cops.”_

Castiel grips the phone tight, and he suddenly, fervently wishes that he’d managed to fuck up that jackass cop back at the scene because it’s one hundred percent that guy who made Kevin sound like this.

“Winchester. Fuck,” Kevin blurts finally.

Winchester. All right. So Jackass has a name.

“Thank you, Kevin. You did good.”

Kevin makes a noise, kind of low and strange.

“It’s okay,” Castiel says. “It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

And he hangs up, and he gets out of bed, and he looks around his room.

It’s going to be a long day, he can already tell. 


	4. Chapter 4

Gilda has kicked Dean out of the hospital room twice now, and he can take a hint.

Hovering, she called it. Mother henning, Charlie amended. Either way he could tell that he was wearing out his welcome, so he got lost.

He’d brought breakfast. Coffee was usually a good way to get on Charlie’s good side, and he’d made sure that it was from a place that Gilda approved of, organic and fair trade and he even got hers with almond milk, the way she likes it. They’d accepted them gladly, entertained him for an hour, and then told him to get out and go be a productive human.

Lunch went pretty much the same way.

He’d already been to check in with the precinct about his statement. They didn’t need anything else right now--they had the report that stated he’d discharged his weapon, and he had to fill out all the pursuant paperwork on that, but there was no body. There wasn’t a victim. There wasn’t shit to show for the fact that Dean shot some potentially mentally ill person three times.

It was kind of like it never happened, which Dean knows is for the best, but makes him feel a little ill.

The guy’s somewhere. He is. The guy is somewhere and that Kevin kid’s asshole friend knows where it is but he can’t find either of them and he has no other leads, no other ideas. He’d been counting on Kevin to crack pretty easy under mild police pressure, but no such luck.

So two o’clock in the afternoon finds Dean wandering through the International District. Two o’clock finds Dean uncomfortably and suddenly close to the PPH.

It’s not that he never comes here. It’s just that he doesn’t come here often and he hasn’t come here lately. It’s futile. Sam won’t see him. And while he’s responsible for Sam’s medical decisions when he can’t be, Sam is still a grown-ass man and he has the right to determine who he sees and doesn’t see, as long as he’s able.

Dean doesn’t know much about what’s happening with Sam anymore. He gets briefed on changes in Sam’s treatment plan, things like that, because if Sam’s not lucid enough he has to make those calls. But he knows that there’s not a lot of stuff that his brother gets to decide. There are meals planned for him, his meds are not optional, he doesn’t pick his clothes, he doesn’t decorate his room. He gets little requests--books to read, shit like that. But Sam’s day is planned inside and out, and he’s not consulted about basically any of it.

So if the one thing Sam gets to control is who gets to visit him...Dean isn’t gonna take that away from him. He’ll respect it, even if it kills him.

And on days like this, it comes close.

He is not actually close to the hospital. He’s at the foot of the hill, on the sidewalk, looking up at the hospital--at his brother’s home for the last four years. And it strikes him, suddenly, violently, how much he wants to go talk to his brother right now.

Charlie’s in the hospital and she says it’s not his fault but he knows if he hadn’t gotten up in that guy’s face, she’d be okay. Gilda’s not blaming him but she’s rightfully keeping her space with her girlfriend private. Benny’s pissed at him because he fucked up on the job and he hasn’t even talked to Bobby yet because he can’t bear to think of how disappointed the old man’s going to be in what he did.

There’s exactly one person who’d understand, who’d be able to talk through this with him, and that person is locked up in that fucking art deco monstrosity on top of the hill.

Dean sits down on the sidewalk, facing the hospital, and pulls his rosary out of his pocket.

Dean’s seen a lot of shit and he doesn’t know if anybody’s listening when he offers up his novenas and his decades for his brother. But the wooden beads beneath his fingers are worn and smooth from the oil of his skin, and when he tries real hard he can remember the way his mom’s face looked when they prayed before church on Sundays.

The words he has memorized, they’re not the ones she’d say, but he knows the words and he knows the meaning and he knows the heart of the prayers is the same as the ones that passed his mom’s lips. And he knows if she was still here, she’d be praying for Sammy--and he hopes that wherever she is, she’s praying for him anyway. Praying for both of them.

So he leans back against a chain-link fence and puts his thumb over the first large bead, right next to the crucifix.

“Pater noster,” he begins, “qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum…”

And he hopes that something of it can penetrate the towering glass and brick that keeps his brother impossibly far away from him.

 

* * *

 

Castiel doesn’t usually follow up with his clients.

You expel a demon from a person’s body, they don’t usually get a real clear or positive first impression. Pain, confusion, fear, and a vague sense of Castiel’s face? Not a recipe for a great friendship.

But this time, he worries. Because that jackass cop isn’t leaving this alone, and Castiel has absolutely no doubt that he’s going to pursue this like a dog on a scent. He went after Castiel, he went after Kevin, and he’s definitely going to go after this poor fuck here who did nothing wrong but get caught by a demon.

He walks into Harborview and his nose wrinkles at the antiseptic smell of hospital just above the grime and misery of sick, impoverished people. Guy was a John Doe, so they wouldn’t bring him to the fancy hospitals. Charity all the way for this guy.

He shows up at the desk.

“Looking for Dr. Anna Milton,” he says to the woman at the desk.

Phoebe raises an eyebrow.

He’s met her a few times before, coming in like this, always for Anna. Phoebe’s a good woman. Holds the line against the unwashed hordes. Keeps the doctors from going crazier than they have to. But she is often an impediment to Castiel getting what he wants, and that is typically unacceptable.

Today, she looks like she’s in a good mood.

“Anna’s a busy woman,” she says flatly. “She’ll see you when she sees you.”

“But she’ll know I’m here,” Castiel prompts.

Phoebe rolls her eyes.

“You always make sure everyone is aware that you’re here, sir. Go take a seat and calm yourself. Dr. Milton will be by when she can.”

And Castiel doesn’t really have a hell of a lot of a choice.

He sits down and doesn’t exactly read a couple of Us Weeklys but he skims them. He and Kevin have a couple of bets running about which celebrities have made unsavory deals with unsavory beings, and he likes to keep tabs on them. Lately Kevin’s picks have been doing really, suspiciously well.

 _Shit_.

It’s about forty-five minutes later when Anna walks out into the lobby, leaning over the desk and talking quietly to Phoebe for a moment before she finally gestures for Castiel to come over and follow her.

“Always good to see you, Cas,” she says, and her voice is warm like she really means it.

Anna was in Castiel’s graduating class in high school, but she’d always been closer to Gabriel. He never blamed her for that. Gabriel is easier to be close to, and they have a lot in common--that drive in both of them to help other people, to fix them. Castiel isn’t a person who fixes other people. He breaks them and takes out what is wrong inside. He lets people like Gabriel and Anna put them back together after.

And Anna is the best in her field at putting people back together. She has the bearing of an east coast socialite, all impeccable posture and more impeccable grooming, and meeting her the first time one would be forgiven for thinking that she's some kind of society heiress. However, what she actually is is the preeminent trauma surgeon in Washington state, holding both an MD and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. Lots of kids from their class went on to do impressive things, but even among their cohort Anna was the kid from their class who made good, and she came back home.

Only to get tangled, like everyone he cared about did, in the steaming pile of shit that is Castiel’s life. His extracurriculars, as Anna puts it.

So Anna signed on, in a way. Castiel would let her know when her patients had something more than their intake files indicated going on, and she in turn would refer them to Gabriel and gently push them to resources that might help them make sense of what had happened to them.

“Good to see you too,” he says, and he doesn’t not mean it.

“I’m guessing you’re here about Brandon,” she says.

Castiel doesn’t waste his breath asking if that’s his John Doe. Anna always cuts to the chase.

“I need to see him.”

Anna pauses, but nods briskly, and starts off down the hallway.

“He’s stable, lucid, recovering well. Memory loss, some organic, some encouraged by his doctor. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. He’s pretty shaken up. I’ve given him Gabriel’s card, of course.”

“Who is he?” Castiel asks.

Anna makes a couple of winding turns and Castiel follows her. They arrive in front of a small, private room, and she pauses.

“He’s just a guy, Cas. Works at Bartell’s. Lives with his girlfriend and a roommate in a place in Pioneer Square. Not a drifter, not a college kid, not some pillar of society, just some guy. And he’s scared. So if you go in there like you usually do, I’m going to pull you out.”

Castiel draws an x over his heart.

Anna narrows her eyes.

“Why do you even want to see him? I’ve given him Gabriel’s card. That should be the end of it for you.”

Castiel shoves a hand roughly through his hair and blows out a big sigh. Anna looks a little surprised, leans against the wall.

“The cops were on the scene,” he says finally.

Anna furrows her brow, but waits.

“The demon, it fucked one of them up pretty good. Her partner got pissed, tried to take the thing on. I intervened, and so he thinks it got away. He would’ve gotten himself fucking killed, Anna, stop looking at me like that, Jesus.”

“You got in a fight with a cop?” she hisses. “Castiel, what are you thinking?”

“That I wasn’t going to let some innocent asshole from the SPD get mangled by a fucking demon if I could do something about it?” Castiel retorts. “Anna, what was I supposed to do?”

Anna presses the heel of her hand against her temple, regaining her control.

“Okay. And?”

“And,” Castiel says, “the cop is still pissed. The partner. The first one, she’s still in the hospital.”

They look at each other.

“Oh shit, Charlie Bradbury,” Anna says. “I performed her surgery. She was incredibly lucky, it almost--”

“Almost ripped her femoral artery in half, yeah, I was there. Well, her partner is on a rampage. He’s been trying to track me down ‘cause I had to let him get a look at my face. He even grabbed Kevin, tried to ply the kid with decaf tea.”

Anna stills, which Castiel finds an odd reaction to what was supposed to have been a joke, but he keeps going.

“But he’s looking for this guy. This Brandon. So he needs to get out of the hospital and into hiding as fast as possible. Dye his hair. Plastic fucking surgery. This asshole, this Winchester fuck, he’s not going to stop.”

“Officer Winchester?” Anna says.

Castiel shrugs, irritated.

But Anna looks troubled. “Dean Winchester? No, okay, I know him. What the hell did you get in a fight with him for?”

“For trying to commit suicide by demon. Are we even having the same conversation?”

Anna shakes her head vehemently. “Cas, don’t do this. Dean is a good guy. A good cop.”

“Did I say he wasn’t?” Castiel snaps.

“He’s not someone you want on your bad side, either. When I say he’s a good cop I mean that he’s a white hat, but he’s also damn good at his job.”

Castiel shrugs. “I guess it’s a little late for that.”

Anna sighs, running her hands over her head. “Christ. Okay. I’ll make sure we keep Brandon as quiet as possible,” she says. “I can’t change the intake report or anything we already have on file, but I’ll do what I can to keep him off of the cops’ radar. And to keep Dean away from him. I don’t make any promises, and if he comes in here with legitimate cause, I’m going to comply with the police.”

Castiel feels a touch of the violin-string tension between his shoulders bleed away, and he nods. “Thanks, Anna.”

“Yeah,” she says, unlocking the door. “Don’t take long. I’m supposed to be on my lunch.”

Castiel ignores her and slips into the room.

Brandon H., as his file says, is gazing blearily at the tiny, ancient CRT TV mounted on the wall. He turns his head when he hears the door open, and it’s a testament to the meds he’s on that he only frowns slightly when he sees Castiel instead of some hospital personnel.

“You’re not a doctor.”

“That’s judgy,” Castiel says.

Brandon frowns harder.

Then his eyes clear a little.

“I know you,” he says.

Castiel sighs and goes to sit on the bed next to him.

“Unfortunately,” Castiel says.

“You were there the night I got attacked,” Brandon says, and Castiel can hear the fear rising in his voice. He slips back a little on the bed, away from Castiel. There’s not far to go, but he goes as far as he can.

“At the end, yeah.” Castiel pulls out a cigarette, looks up at the door where Anna is posted, and thinks better of it.

“What do you want? I’m going to call the nurse,” Brandon says, his fingers fumbling for the call button.

Castiel grabs his hand.

“I’m here on doctor’s orders,” he says. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m here to help you, Brandon. But you have to help me, first.”

Brandon swallows visibly.

“I need you to tell me what you remember of that night. And I mean everything. The crazier it sounds, the more I need to hear it. So don’t leave shit out. I don’t have admitting powers, so you won’t be going to the psych ward on my word.”

Brandon shakes his head. “No, I don’t know--I don’t remember.”

“You remember an attack,” Castiel says.

“I don’t,” Brandon says, and he sounds desperate, like this is not the first or second or third time he’s said this.

Castiel narrows his eyes.

“Look, you said to tell you the stuff that sounds crazy. All of it sounds crazy. I think the doctors are gonna put me away, man. It was like a fucking dream. I remember getting off of work and then nothing, not clearly, for a week. At least. I think. My girlfriend says I was gone longer than that, like two weeks, but I don’t remember that much time. That’s not normal, right?”

He looks at Castiel beseechingly. Castiel doesn’t say anything.

Brandon crumples a little under the silence, but continues. “I remember...flashes. Like a dream. Like--like a two-week-long nightmare. There are pictures in my head but I don’t know if they’re from a movie or if it was the nightmare or if I saw something but--Christ, I hope--I hope it was a movie.”

He buries his face in his hands.

Castiel feels for him. He does. The poor fucker is in the middle of what, if he has any luck, is the worst few days of his life. But he doesn’t have time to go easy on him just because of that.

“Tell me what you saw.”

Brandon shudders, but lowers his hands.

“It’s mostly images,” he says. Begs. “But I--I remember it. Moving my body. Not me moving--something else moving me. I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” Castiel lies. “I know what you’re talking about. Go on.”

Brandon gives him a panicked look. “Do you? Because I don’t. I don’t know what it was--but it talked to me, a little. In my head. While I was stuck. It said that they were coming. That he was coming soon and that they were preparing his way.”

Castiel’s guts turn to ice.

“It said I was a lucky son of a bitch to get to watch it all happen, and then it stopped talking to me. And I don’t remember much more. Until the attack.

“I remember there was a woman. A cop, I think. Little. Red hair. I saw her--I remember picking my hand up or seeing something raise my hand and she went flying against her car. Like, flying. Like something shoved her, but--no, like the wind swept her away. She flew.”

“And then?” Cas presses.

“I just--I remember something being so happy. Just--glee. It wasn’t me. But it was me that felt it. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Keep going,” Cas says.

Brandon’s eyes are glistening now. “The cop, the lady, she was hurt. Real bad. Something caught her leg, or something cut her leg when it pushed her, or I don’t know, but she was bleeding. And then, that happiness. I swear to God I don’t know what it was, I don’t hate cops, I swear to--”

“Keep. Going,” Castiel growls.

Brandon stares at him, and says, “I don’t--it’s choppy after that. Something about another cop. Running. He was running, I was running. Then--pain.”

Brandon swallows again.

“And you.”

If Castiel had a buck for every time somebody told him all I remember is running, pain, and you…

“And then you woke up here?”

Brandon nods.

Castiel takes a deep breath.

“So here’s the thing, Brandon. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Brandon says “I know” but he looks like a thousand pounds were lifted from his shoulders.

“But something wearing your body did.”

Brandon gets real still.

“And the cops? The lady and her partner? They saw your body there. They saw something wearing a Brandon suit throw her against her car and tear open her leg. And the partner, he remembers.”

Castiel registers a quicker beep beep beep as the heart rate monitor that Brandon’s hooked up to starts to spike.

“One of your doctors, she gave you a card for a therapist,” he says. “Take her advice. But you need more than that. You need to lie low. You need to get discharged. Because that cop your body took out is here. And that means that her partner is, too.”

Beep beep beep beep beep beep

“And that’s enough for today,” Anna says, sweeping into the room and grabbing Castiel by the arm. “Brandon, take some deep breaths. I’ll be back in to check on you. Say good night, Gracie.”

Castiel glares at Anna as she hauls him out of the room.

“You were going to have every nurse on duty in that room,” Anna says under her breath before Castiel can even inhale to start yelling at her. “His pulse was skyrocketing. And no fucking wonder. Do you even hear yourself when you talk?”

“I do, I just don’t think anybody else does,” Castiel mutters.

“This how you talk to that poor kid you hang out with? It better not be.”

Castiel feels a stab of anger at her mention of Kevin, but he suppresses it because this is Anna and she speaks out of not only some kind of sentimental attachment to Kevin but also as a fucking medical professional.

“I’m careful with Kevin,” Castiel says.

Anna sticks a finger in his face. “I ever find out otherwise, I’m coming to kick your ass.”

“Better take the stilettos off first, princess.”

“Oh, no. The stilettos stay on.”

Anna’s smile is wicked, and while all is not forgotten, Castiel feels that it has perhaps been forgiven, for now.

* * *

 

Sam Winchester’s file is laid across Gabriel’s desk, and there’s a number highlighted on it. Gabriel taps the number a few times, his other hand on his phone.

There’s only one family contact on Sam’s file--an older brother, Dean. A non-relative is there as an emergency contact, Bobby Singer, but there’s a note saying that Dean is to be called first and preferentially and that only Dean has power of attorney and decision-making rights. And Dean is to be called with changes to Sam’s treatment plan or personnel.

Hence the phone.

Gabriel’s not crazy about calling family. It’s not his forte. He’s great with the patients, he loves dealing with them, but families can go one of a couple of ways. There’s the pity party, where he gets sad sighs and morose uh huhs and whatever you think is best. Then there’s the disinterested--why are you telling me, just do your job. It’s the very rare family who shows any real interest, any real engagement.

Many of his hospitalized patients are out of sight, out of mind, and with so few people in his life, he wonders if that’s not true for Sam, too.

But he has a responsibility to call Sam’s brother. It’s been agreed upon and it’s out of his hands. So he dials the number.

It rings a few times. Enough times that Gabriel is able to hope that maybe it’ll just go to voicemail and he’ll get to put this off until another--

“Hello?”

Fuck.

“Hi, is this Dean Winchester?” Gabriel leans back in his chair, trying to press an incipient headache out of his temple with his thumb.

_“Yeah, this is he. Who’s this?”_

“Hi, Dean. My name’s Gabriel, and I’m calling to introduce myself--I’m your brother’s new therapist at Pacific.”

There’s a pause, and Gabriel hangs in that space, waiting for this Dean to reveal himself with his next words.

Finally, _“Yeah. Oh. Okay. Sammy’s, uh--is he okay? Did you see him yet?”_

His voice is hopeful, masked under layers of gruffness. He doesn’t want to seem vulnerable. He doesn’t want to sound as hopeful as he does, but Gabriel can cut right through the bullshit, it’s his whole job to cut through the bullshit.

It makes Gabriel slightly more inclined to not hate him.

“I did see your brother, yes. Obviously I can’t tell you what we talked about, but I know that per the treatment plan and the agreement that you have with the hospital, you’re entitled to know about personnel changes. And I’m happy to help you if you need resources in navigating the various parts of Sam’s care, or if you have questions about his treatment.”

Another pause.

“ _I think I, uh, I think I understand Sammy’s treatment. Can I ask why he’s got a new therapist? Did uh...oh, hell, what was her name? Pamela? Did she leave?”_

Gabriel barely stifles a snort at that. Pamela is _aggressively_ still around. And fucking _handsy_ , even for a blind woman.

“Oh, no, she’s still around. No, I’m a new member of his team--more social work side, functional behavior side, seeing what we can do to try to get Sam more ready for the outside world if that becomes an option.”

_“Is that an option?”_

The hope is clear through the shit now.

“Not... I mean not immediately, not by any means. I’ve only just met your brother, Dean. Don’t expect miracles. He’s been there for a while and that doesn’t go away in a day.”

 _“Yeah, no. I know. I._ ” Dean takes a deep breath, releases it slowly. _“I know. I just--I hope you can help him. It’s been...it’s been a long road. Thanks for calling me, Doc.”_

“Not a doctor,” Gabriel says hurriedly. “MSW. Just a counselor. Hopefully, eventually, a transition counselor. And you’re my client’s family, so of course I’m gonna call you. Thanks for talking to me.”

“ _Yeah, for sure. Um. If you talk to Sammy and it’s, uh, and it’s okay, if you could--just tell him I say hi? He hasn’t let me visit him in...a long time. And I just want him to know that I. You know. Miss him._ ” There’s a faint sound at the other end of the line that may be a shaky breath, may just be static. “ _A lot. So if you could_.”

“If I think it’s appropriate, I’ll tell him,” Gabriel says. “Thanks for your time, Dean.”

_“Nice to talk to you. Thanks for your help- hey, do you think I could get your number?”_

“You can contact me through the hospital if you need to, or if necessary, I will contact you,” he answers.

“ _Oh_ ,” Dean says. _“I was hoping to uh...maybe check in more regularly?_ ”

He’s officially surprised now. “I can’t make any guarantees, but I could probably contact you on a biweekly basis, if you would like,” he says.

 _“Is that the twice a week biweekly or the every-other-week biweekly?”_ he asks.

Gabriel snorts. “Every other week,” he replies. “I’d need to make sure that would be acceptable with the rest of the team and Sam, of course, but it’s very likely that could be arranged.”

 _“Really? That’d be- that’d be amazing. Thank you for calling, it really- thanks_ ,” he says.

Gabriel hangs up the phone and leans back in his chair, befuddled.

There’s something there. It might be good, it might be catastrophically bad, but there’s something there. And apparently Dean knows Pamela.

Gabriel sighs heavily.

 _Shit_.

He’s going to have to go to a bar with Pamela.

* * *

 

Dean hangs up and he looks at his phone for a long moment.

He’s not sure he’s ever gotten that call. He appreciates the hell out of it though- it’s good to know that there’s something happening inside that building, that there’s people who see Sam and think of him and what he needs. He’s not just locked up in some cage where no one will see him, devils tearing him to shreds.

God knows his brother has spent enough time wrestling his demons on his own.

Dean adjusts his tie. Slips his phone into his pocket and steps out of his car. Crosses the street quickly and enters the cathedral.

St. James is a strange building, but it’s the only one Dean can imagine attending mass in at this point. In Kansas, the Catholic church had been done out of double-wide temporary trailer, the baptismal font a birdbath just inside the door. Before Dean could remember, the old building had been swept away by a tornado,  and the congregation had never had enough money to put them back in a more permanent space. The big money in town went Baptist, built them multi-building churches with gyms and basketball courts. And there are Catholic churches like that here in Seattle, but there was something holy, something real about the trailer where he and Sammy were baptized. Thinking of it, Dean recalls Deuteronomy 15:11- “For the poor will never cease to be in the land; therefore I command you, saying, 'You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.'”

St. James is anything but poor, and it’s far cry from the trailer, but it feels holy, and something about that feeling makes Dean feel like he can be saved.

He crosses himself as he enters, and he quietly takes a pew at the back of the church, barely able to see the priest all the way at the front. He’s never introduced himself to the guy, not in the seven years he’s been coming here.

Mass is like being at the shooting range. It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s like the strings that control him cut and he just is, in this calm, silent space. No thinking, no anxiety, just doing. Just being.

Dean is his most real here and behind his gun.

He considers going to confession sometimes and telling that to the priest. That he is a blunt instrument, built for violence, order, and worship. That these are his purposes, the entirety of his being.

His prayers are said on quiet lips. He lets the communion wafer melt away on his tongue. He thinks of the flesh and blood of God himself, he thinks of the Ghost called here in this place. He thinks of the devil, the ubiquity of sin.

The service finishes and he stays there, looking forward at the altar, at the priest, at the windows.

As he steps out of his aisle, he can’t believe his luck.

It’s Kevin. Kevin, friends with the mystery asshole, Kevin who drinks chamomile tea unironically and who runs like a jackrabbit. And Dean smiles, noticing the petite woman beside the kid. He genuflects, crosses himself, and follows them out into the vestibule.

They greet the priest and Dean is there behind them, bumping into the woman as she turns.

“Oh, excuse me, I’m so sorry,” he says, catching her elbow solicitously although she wasn’t in any danger of falling. “Are you all right?”

She smiles politely, unable to see the look of horror that is dawning on her son’s face behind her. Dean, on the other hand, sees it. Ignores it.

“Fine, thank you. I wasn’t looking.”

Dean smiles winningly. “Are you new to the parish? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at services before. I’m Dean.”

The woman shakes her head and takes the hand that Dean has extended to her. “No, but we usually attend the ten o’clock Sunday service. My son’s in high school and homework can make weekday Mass a challenge. I’m Linda Tran, and this is Kevin.”

“We’ve m-met,” Kevin says darkly.

Linda looks up at her son, frowning, then back at Dean. The warmth in her expression is fading quickly, and Dean knows he has to save this.

He takes a second, a little thrown, but doesn’t let it show. “Yes ma’am. I’m SPD, and your son was kind enough to help me by answering a few questions pertaining to an investigation a couple of nights ago. Didn’t expect to see him again, but he was very helpful.”

“Mom,” Kevin says quietly, and braces himself, taking several deep breaths before he manages, “I have hhhomework.”

“I hear the sisters have donuts in the family center,” Dean says. “I was thinking of heading down that way. Care to join me? They’re good.”

Linda doesn’t say anything for a moment. She’s studying Dean, her gaze sharp, and Kevin tugs her hand like a child.

Like a smaller child. Kid looks even younger dressed in slacks and a button-down, like he’s going to take school pictures. He could’ve been an immature college kid back at the pho place; here, he looks every inch a high school student and not a day older.

“I have homework,” he hisses.

She turns and launches into a short barrage of rapidfire...Vietnamese? Dean’s guessing but that’s what it sounds like to him. It cows the kid, like Dean has seen sudden scolding in native languages do to many a child, and Kevin hangs his head.

Linda smiles up at Dean, but he’s a little unnerved by it. There’s something vaguely predatory about it.

“Lead the way,” she says.

Dean grins, and glances at Kevin. The kid looks rattled but resigned, like he hates everything about what’s happening but knows that his mom isn’t gonna be moved. Dean’s seen that look on Sammy’s face, back in high school, when he realized that Dean was not going to be dissuaded from whatever stupid scheme he’d cooked up.

It’s a short walk in the rain to the outreach center, where petite nuns (Dean’s never met a nun who’s taller than five foot three) gladly hand out donuts, fresh from the grease and covered in granulated sugar. They’re hot, leaving a little vapor of steam on the early autumn air. He grabs a cup of coffee, and Linda does the same. Kevin goes for a cup of herbal tea, the tag to the teabag hanging at the bottom of the styrofoam cup.

“You said you have met my son?” She asks, raising an eyebrow. She takes a sip of her coffee.

Dean nods.”Nothing formal, didn’t drag him down to the station or anything- just a chat. I thought maybe he could assist in a continuing investigation, but-”

“Kevin had some trouble a couple of years ago but he’s a good boy and he’s college bound. Stanford,” she says. Her voice is sharp and combative. Dean can’t help but wonder if she moved here when she was very small or if her parents just spoke Vietnamese mostly around the house- no trace of an accent on her voice but her speech pattern is clipped and severe.

“He didn’t do anything wrong, ma’am, I hope you didn’t think I was insinuating that he had,” Dean says. He pauses. “I feel like we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot-”

Kevin snorts his tea and Linda looks at her son.

“My partner was attacked under suspicious circumstances,” Dean says. “She’s a good cop- the kind that you want your kids going to when they get lost in the grocery store. A man that I saw at a restaurant with your son interfered with my ability to continue the investigation with the attacker.”

Linda looks back at Kevin.

Kevin says something in the angular language his mother used earlier, pausing a few times to stutter through a word. She asks him a question, and Kevin says something more. Dean hears a sharp version of his own last name among the talk.

Linda looks back at Dean. “He did you a favor,” she says.

“Excuse me?” Dean asks.

“Castiel, he did you a favor, Officer Winchester,” she says. “And Kevin did you another when he left the coffee shop. I will do you one more. Keep coming to services, you need them, and leave my son alone.”

She places her empty cup in the trash and she nods respectfully at one of the nuns. “Kevin, you have homework,” she says.

And they leave, leaving Dean with more questions than answers, but with part of a name.

Castiel.

Unusual name.

Seattle’s a big city, but there’s probably not too many Castiels in it.

Dean watches them leave, and then he practically skips back to his car.

It might be a dead lead, but it’s the start of something. It’s the beginning of something more.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Castiel kicks the door to his apartment open and he wedges his way in, one hand full with a (reusable) bag full of groceries and the other holding his cell phone to his face.

“Anna said she’d be sending the guy your way, so once he’s discharged, he should be looking for you,” Castiel said, flicking the lights on with his shoulder. “Yeah. Yeah. He’s shaken up and I don’t think he’s out of the woods but Anna’s trying to keep him quiet until they can get him out.”

He puts his groceries on the counter and kicks the door shut, throwing the lock shut. He checks the saltline- still continuous and undisturbed. 

“ _ Super, _ ” Gabriel grouses on the other end. “ _ One more to add to the pile of not just crazy, but crazy plus demons. Thanks, Cas, you’re a pal. _ ”

“I didn’t possess him, asshole,” Castiel says as he begins unloading his groceries. Cans of chickpeas, some mushrooms, a jar of thai curry paste that  _ mercifully _ did not break and leave everything he bought today bright red.

“ _ And I didn’t volunteer to set up a psych practice for the damned, but here we all are. _ ”

Castiel rolls his eyes, and since Gabriel can’t see that, he also says, “World’s smallest violin, Gabriel.  _ My Heart Bleeds For You. _ What else do you have to do, anyway?”

“ _ Actually, _ ” Gabriel says, and Castiel doesn’t restrain his groan, “ _ I got this case down at the PPH that you wouldn’t believe. _ ”

“Is it a perfectly sane man locked up unjustly in a psychiatric hospital?” He asks. He pulls out the can of coffee and puts it on top of the fridge, beside the bread- which is more  _ mold _ than anything else at this point. He sighs at it.

“... _ No. _ ”

“I’ll probably believe it, then.”

“ _ No, but Cas, this kid, he’s something else. Everybody insists he’s really violent, a danger to himself and others--the kind of patient they need to keep cameras on with in case he attacks me. But he doesn’t present like that, not at all, and I can’t get a read on him. He’s exactly my type--paranoid schizophrenic with religious delusions-- _ ”

“Can you not call that your ‘type’?” He switches on his teakettle and grabs a teabag. 

“-- _ but there’s something else there, too. He’s really smart, Cas. He tries really hard to present all the negative symptoms of schizophrenia-- _ ”

Castiel actually laughs out loud as he closes the fridge door. “I know you love to show off your fancy college-learning, but dumb it down, professor. And slow down, if you actually want me to keep up.”

“ _The, uh. Negative symptoms--things he shouldn’t be doing if he’s really schizophrenic--he tries real hard for a flat affect but he just looks tired, like bone-tired, but not null. He’s faking it. He’s_ faking _it, Cas. He’s been in the hospital for four years and he’s faking something. He’s not trying to get better. He won’t cooperate with any kind of psychosocial therapy, but he’s perfectly med compliant. He’s got family support--a brother, this guy Dean, who seems real involved. He’s a smart kid. He wants to stay in the hospital, Cas, I know he does. Just….why? Why would he want that?_ ” Gabriel has a tone to his voice that’s worrying- like he’s found the best puzzle in the world.

“I don’t know,” Castiel says gamely. “Why would he want that?”

“ _ Because where’s safer than a hospital with lots of security? _ ” Gabriel sounds thrilled. “ _ He believes the Devil is after him, or something--I haven’t heard him say it yet, and his files are all over the place, but it’s demons. I think he’s one of yours, Cassie. I’m gonna look into it some more but when you hear Sam Winchester, you jump. Anyway, there’s a new director at the PPH, this creepy guy named-- _ ”

“Winchester?”Castiel all but shouts into the phone, bolting up just as he’d sat down on his ragged sofa.

A pause.

“ _ Yes? _ ”

“Sam  _ Winchester _ . And his brother is  _ Dean _ .”

“ _ Cas, what the hell is-- _ ”

Castiel starts pacing through his apartment. It’s a very short circuit but he begins it nonetheless.

“I told you about the cop whose partner got fucked up by the demon a couple nights ago. The one who harassed Kevin,” he barks.

“ _ What about him? _ ”

“His name is Dean. Dean Winchester.”

Gabriel goes quiet for a minute, then, “ _ Shit, Cas. _ ”

“And his brother’s in the hospital for  _ my  _ kind of spooky psycho shit,” he sighs, wiping his hand over his face.

Gabriel bristles on the other end of the phone, in the kind of indignant way only Gabriel can really manage.“ _ He’s not--there is definitely a better way you could have phrased that, you insensitive fuck. _ ”

“He fucks up my exorcism and his brother’s got demons in his head?” he asks. “Coincidence?”

There’s silence on the other end of the phone for a minute. “ _ Cas, I don’t like this _ ,” his brother says.

“Oh, yeah, it’s  _ double Christmas _ for me,” Castiel snaps. There’s another pause, and then he says, “Sorry- that’s not- it’s not-”

“ _ Come to my office,”  _ Gabriel says.  _ “You need to see the file. _ ”

“See you in an hour,” Castiel sighs.

He hangs up. 

His teakettle finishes.

* * *

 

The computer stuff is not Dean’s favorite part of being a cop. But right now, he hates it less than he usually does.

So as it turns out, there is actually only one Castiel of the right age in the city of Seattle: Castiel Novak. (There are two much younger ones, but he doesn’t think that the kindergartner or the three-year-old are likely to be his guy.)  But he’s a fucking ghost. He’s got two previous apartments that Dean can track down, but a call to the last listed says he moved out years ago. There’s no more recent residence.

He’s not on file with prints or anything--never been brought in on charges, no trouble with the law, which seems suspicious given that Dean’s looking him up for interfering with detention of a suspect in an all but in-progress assault on a police officer. And he did it with a violence and confidence that led Dean to believe that this was not his first rodeo with shit like that--that he just did not give a single shit about cops. That he thought he was better, above that.

Dean’s got a pair of cuffs and a holding cell that say otherwise.

That thought has him smiling grimly as he scrolls through what is proving to be useless information. He’s got a couple of former places of employment, though nothing current, then going back some school records--Mercer Island. Swanky. And surprising. Dean had not had this Castiel guy pegged as middle class, let alone old money. Still, he’d been to private schools on Mercer, and the graduating class had some people in it whose names were probably on lots of museums’ and symphonies’ donor walls.

So what the fuck was he doing down in Pioneer Square attacking cops?

He’s hit Google searches now, and there’s an old picture from a UW student newspaper showing a much younger Castiel looking about as dour and unwelcoming as he does now, but with longer hair and fewer lines around his eyes. Some kind of Honors Society thing. Lists the names of his parents, so Dean enters that into the SPD database.

There should be a word in the English language that manages to mesh  _ bingo _ and  _ shit _ , because that’s the feeling that Dean gets when he sees the first hit.

The file on Castiel Novak’s family is long. Cold case kind of long. Cross-referenced with newspaper archives, it paints an incredibly vivid picture that leaves Dean’s skin tingling and his breath coming too short.

_ Tragic House Fire on Mercer Island Kills Family--Arson Suspected. _

Both parents and an older sibling are listed as the deceased. Castiel and another brother, Gabriel, escaped the fire. A picture from the newspaper shows the gutted framework of what must have been a spacious home. It looks like matchsticks. It looks like ruin.

Jesus.

Dean rolls his chair away from his desk, runs his hands over his face.

“Winchester.”

He alt-tabs out of the window real quick and turns around.

Lt. Lafitte is standing over him, arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed. Dean is studiously still. He doesn’t shift uncomfortably. He really, really wants to.

“Sir,” Dean says crisply. “Is my paperwork in order for my weapons discharge?”

“Christ, Dean, don’t give me this shit,” Lafitte says. He pulls up a chair and swings it close to Dean. “I want you to tell me what happened.”

“You have my report.”

Lafitte frowns, his jaw tight.

“Dean--”

“Boss, I don’t have anything else to tell you. Am I okay? Or should I expect--” Dean takes a second, swallows. “--am I gonna be off the street for a while?”

Lafitte shakes his head. “Shit doesn’t stick to you, Winchester. Without a body or some asshole complaining that you shot him, we don’t have much. Something comes up? Your gun’s on my desk. Until then...try not to get in trouble. I know that’s a tall order for you.”

Most other days, Dean would grin and flick a lazy salute. Today, he just nods.

Lafitte notices the change. Dean knows he does. But he just leaves.

One, two, three breaths. Then he brings the screen back up.

It wasn’t too long ago. It wasn’t--it wasn’t like  _ his _ fire. This Castiel, he was an adult. He and his brother both. They were adults when they ducked out from beneath the crumbling ceiling, the flames grabbing at them, singeing the backs of their heads, and they didn’t have the weight of a baby half their own weight impossibly heavy in their arms, impossibly heavy but impossible to drop because  _ take your brother, Dean _ \--

Dean shuts down the window.

Castiel is  _ not  _ the same as him.

Castiel Novak is a  _ criminal  _ and he’s the reason that Charlie’s  _ assailant  _ is not in jail right now and it doesn’t matter that he knows what it feels like to run from flame that you are so, so sure is faster than you are.

No.

Castiel Novak is not like him.

What Castiel Novak  _ is _ , though, is in a shitload of trouble, because now he’s got a first name and a last name and if he’s not off the streets, if he’s still on his beat, then yeah. He’s gonna find this son of a bitch and he’s gonna answer for what happened to Charlie.

Dean grabs his coat.

* * *

 

Castiel shuts the file and swears a blue streak- not literally, there’s no lightning summoned and he’s using one of the tongues of man, but just  _ barely _ . He looks up at Gabriel, who is standing, leaning against his window, arms crossed.

“What do you think?” he asks. He asks with that anxious kind of voice- the kind Gabriel gets when something is wrong and he knows it.

The file is  _ incredible _ \- what Castiel can read. A lot of the information is buried inside of the clinical jargon, some of it is buried across pages by different therapists, and some of it looks like it’s been redacted- blacked out in permanent marker. Castiel’s not a professional, like Gabriel is, but he knows that that’s not supposed to be like that. 

But what is there-

“You have to let me meet him,” Castiel says.

“Cas-”

“Gabriel, this might be  _ Trouble _ ,” he says. “It might also be nothing, but I don’t feel good about this. I don’t think this is safe.”

“He’s still my patient,” Gabriel says. “He’s still  _ human _ , Cas, okay? What if you charge in there, guns blazing and fuck him up? There’s a history here of real incidents and lapses-”

“You said he was faking,” Castiel interrupts. 

“Maybe now but not in high school!” Gabriel cries. “And even if he’s faking the schizophrenia  _ something _ is wrong with him. If a stranger breaks in and-”

“I’ll be careful,” Castiel says.

“ _ Please _ , Cas,” his brother pleads. “We can feel this out slow, okay? I’m his  _ therapist _ , if you give me a couple of weeks I can maybe start to figure things out.”

“A few weeks might be too late,” Castiel says. He says it and he thinks of Brandon’s voice as he said  _ it said that they were coming _ . _ That they were preparing the way _ .

His brother’s client has the devil in his head.

Gabriel doesn’t say anything more, and Castiel doesn’t either. He stands up, puts his coat back on, and leaves. 

-

Gabriel doesn’t remember a time when his brother wasn’t so serious or so  _ grave _ \- when that scowl wasn’t affixed to his face and he didn’t study things and look at them like they had personally affronted him. 

He’s changed a little, since it all happened, but he’s still terribly serious. Now, though, there’s the smoking and the drinking and the swearing. Sometimes something maudlin, too, but less often. 

Gabriel can remember a few of his brother’s smiles, but none from the past six years.

* * *

The PPH is quiet at night, and in that quiet, the oozing wrongness is stark, miasmic. Castiel picks his way through it like he picks his way through the undergrowth that leads to the hospital on the sides that aren’t well-lit parking lots.

He doesn’t know the lay of the land here. He’s going in blind and he  _ hates _ it. He has a room number from Gabriel’s file on Sam Winchester, but that’s it. A room number, a file that promises Apocalyptic levels of badness, and the absolute knowledge that he has no time at all to waste.

Gabriel is pissed. And panicked. He’s not sure which is closer to the surface in his brother right now, and he knows that both have their place. Gabriel is annoying as fuck and he’s frequently a thorn in Castiel’s side, but he is a damned good therapist. Castiel is sure he cares about this guy, that he’s worried about what Castiel is going to do here.

And Castiel can’t reassure him, because  _ fuck _ .

This person, this  _ Sam _ , he’s not possessed. No. This far exceeds any long con a demon is capable of, and there’s no way a demon would allow its vessel to be locked up like this for so long. Best-case scenario, it would’ve smoked out long ago, and that doesn’t explain the years that Sam has spent battling this thing. Or living with this thing. Or  _ harboring _ this thing. Whatever the case may be.

Castiel isn’t making any judgments. Not yet. That’s not fair. He knows better than anyone how these things can sink their claws into humans, how they can live behind your eyes and nestled between your ribs and there’s nothing you can do about it. How you wait it out or go down burning. But if Sam has invited this thing, if he’s biding his time, if he is a willing vessel, Castiel won’t give a shit if he’s Gabriel’s patient.

He’ll do what he has to do.

The door opens easily. It’s not locked, of course--it’s not like the hospital shuts down, and it’s not like people stop having mental health needs after five o’clock. He’s not supposed to be here, but he’s not barred entry by locks. Just laws.

The hospital spreads out in front of him, bright, pristine, scrubbed clean. It hardly seems like the kind of place where you can lock up the kind of evil squatting in Sam Winchester’s head, but Lucifer was the most beautiful angel and shit like that about not judging books by their covers. You can scrub away a lot, anyway. Blood, shit, char. It’s all gone with enough effort. But the energies remain, and the floor here is _ sticky _ with the aftereffects of fear and anger and horror. It makes his poker face somewhat hard to maintain.

The trick to breaking in somewhere is the easiest and oldest: pretend you know what you’re doing. Pretend you belong. And that’s tricky for Castiel in a setting like this, but he does his best. He glowers at anybody who looks at him like they’re going to ask a question. It’s a look he’s seen on Gabriel’s face, and on many doctors’ faces, and it’s apparently one that the staff here are familiar with, too. They let him pass uninterrupted.

He doesn’t know the layout of the hospital, no. He has a room number. But he doesn’t even need that. The sickness draws him upstairs, upstairs, around corners and down hallways, unerringly, inevitably. It hooks itself beneath his solar plexus and it  _ tugs _ . It says  _ come to me, little angel. _ It says  _ come play with me _ .

_ Will you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly. _

Nothing’s called him  _ angel  _ in six years.

He gets to the door and he pauses in front of it. 

Weird thing about this sensation, it makes him more aware of the other things around- the other  _ lives _ around.He can feel them, like he can see ants in a hive. He can feel their minds, their heartbeats, their souls. He can feel the distance of the rest of them from this room, all the way at the top of the hospital, in an empty wing. Hell, there aren't even  _ cameras _ here to dodge. Unobserved. Tucked away, as if for safe keeping, the source of this sensation-  _ sticky- _ throbs behind the door.

He crumbles a line of greater nettle across the doorway, to keep whatever is in the room locked within and to keep it from calling for backup.

Not that he thinks this thing will need backup. But along with a few murmured words, it should also keep security from figuring out how to get in until he’s done.

Castiel rests his hand on the handle. There's no cardswipe, just a simple lock. He could probably worm his way into it with a bobby pin, draw a spell about it if he needs to, but when he puts weight against the handle, it's unlocked. It just lets him in, eases him in. The door glides open, and the wash of the sensation, that  _ something _ , it nearly knocks Castiel to the floor.

A body sits up on a bed and looks at him. His eyes are sleepless, waxy and hollow.

"You're not Dean," he says, voice soft and hoarse.

He doesn't sound disappointed, just surprised.

Castiel shakes his head slowly.

"No," he says. "I am not."

Sam Winchester leans over his legs, rubbing his palms into his eyes. His hair is over long and limp, like he doesn't wash it enough. He's thin, too- there's not enough bulk on him for a guy that's this physically _ big _ .

God, his  _ aura _ , though.

"You're  _ new, _ " he moans.

"I'm what?" He asks.

Sam looks up at him, like he's ready to cry. Like an open nerve. "Please stop," he says. "Please, just go back to the old games, please. I'll play along, I'll do anything- please, not new ones.  _ Please _ ."

Castiel knows that he's not who Sam is talking to, and that he doesn't think he's really  _ here _ . Or if he is, it's not him.

"Sam," he says, "who do you think I am?"

"What did you do?" He asks. "When you wore him, what did you do?"

"No one's wearing me," Castiel says. He pulls out the holy water, steps a few steps forward. "No one's wearing me, I swear. I just want to check something. It might burn a little bit, but I bet you're not going to feel a thing."

The focus of Sam's eyes change a little bit, like he's realizing that Castiel, a physical entity, is  _ here _ . His brow furrows. "Are you a doctor?" He asks.

Castiel shrugs. "I am an epidemiologist," he answers, not untruthfully.

"Oh," Sam says. "What kind of epidemic?"

“We’re determining that,” Castiel says, taking this calm to carefully approach Sam. Sam watches him through big, weary eyes, but doesn’t move to stop him.

“Because my files--if you see my file, they’ve looked at encephalitis, meningitis, Charles Bonnet…” Sam heaves a sigh. “That’s not it. I’m not--what I have, it’s not contagious. It’s just me.”

"I'm not sure that's true," Castiel says.

Sam goes rigid. His breathing quickens. He looks like if he could, if he were free, he'd be running and running  _ fast. _

"What did you do?" he whispers. He's looking at Castiel.

"I didn't--" Castiel begins, and Sam flinches.

"No. You're real." It sounds like he's reminding himself. "What did he--what did I do? Who did he--did I hurt someone?"

That's interesting. Castiel narrows his eyes.

“You’ve been in here, Sam,” he says. “How exactly would you have hurt someone?”

The look that Sam gives him is sharp, suddenly, and angry in an unexpected way. It’s suppressed swiftly, but Castiel can see him wrap his hands in his sheets until his knuckles turn white.

“I couldn’t, obviously,” Sam says, dull, rote.

Castiel is close to him, now. Almost close enough to touch him. Close enough for Sam to reach out, though, with his longer reach. He takes another step to close that dangerous difference.

“Who is  _ he _ , Sam?”

Sam shakes his head.

“I don’t--there’s not. I know. I’m responsible for my own actions. I  _ know _ . What kind of epidemiologist are you? Who  _ are _ you?”

Sam’s voice is rising. He’s escalating, and while the fear is still there, still present, still infecting the whole room with its strength and its suffocating thickness, there’s fury, too. Sam thinks Castiel is fucking with him. He must.

“Sam. Just let me check something. I’m not with  _ him _ , I swear to you.”

“You’re not a doctor,” Sam says. “Get away from me.”

Castiel pours the holy water on his own hand and clamps it on Sam’s bare forearm.

The holy water does not burn Sam’s skin. It doesn’t bubble or hiss or sizzle. Sam doesn’t look like he’s in pain--he does not grimace, or pull away.

But the holy water  _ rebels _ .

It curls underneath Castiel’s hand, retracts, and Castiel throws his hand off. Sam stares down at his arm, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open in what looks like horror.

“What did you do,” Sam whispers.

Castiel puts his hand back on Sam’s arm. Sam lets him. They both stare at the point of contact, silent.

This is how the cops find them.

 


	6. Chapter 6

His beat is not nearly as enjoyable for the lack of Charlie.

She’s got a couple more days in the hospital, but she’s recovering well. He knows that she’ll be back in the seat soon enough. It still feels like something of a betrayal, to be riding around without her.

Dean wasn’t sure about going out tonight--he hates patrolling alone. But he was going stir-crazy at the precinct and Lafitte okayed it, so he got in the car and sucked up the hollow feeling that the empty seat to his right gave him. He might as well go out, do some outreach, check on some of their regulars and generally make his presence known. He’s sure that the story of what happened to Charlie has spread, so he should probably try to tamp out any rumors about it. Charlie’s well-liked. People will worry.

The streets are still, though. He touches base with a couple of Charlie’s favorites, lets them know she’ll be back soon. He gets a couple of tourists oriented and he breaks up what was about to be a fight between a guy he knows and a guy he’ll probably get to know pretty soon, and he’s able to leave without arresting anybody. But that’s all. Four hours, and that’s all he has to show for it.

He tries turning on the music in the car, but it feels jarring and it sets his teeth on edge. He turns it off quickly.

As soon as he does, the scanner crackles.

_ “...got a 160 in progress at Pacific Psych, security says they’re locked out, requesting unit to respond. _ ”

Dean grabs his radio before he’s even aware he’s moving, jams the button.

“This is Winchester, I’m en route.”

There’s a pause over the scanner.

“Said I’m en route. Copy?”

“ _ Copy. _ ”

The dispatcher- guy named Ash with a bad haircut- sounds skeptical but Dean doesn’t care. He turns his lights on and guns the gas, tearing down toward the PPH as fast as he can without hitting a pedestrian.

A  _ 160 _ . Prowler with trespass--a break-in at the hospital, basically. And that is not  _ acceptable _ .

Sammy is Dean’s job, his responsibility, first and foremost. Dean wakes up in the morning and he checks the news to make sure Sammy’s okay. He goes to work to pay for Sammy’s care. He keeps himself in working condition to pay for Sammy’s care; he went  _ sober _ to stay alive to make sure Sammy would be okay. He had his first job at thirteen to put food on the table for Sammy and he took a new one once he got to Seattle help Bobby pay for his books and shoes and dances and school trips and then Stanford and now, now the hospital. Now Dean works to maintain the distance, because it’s not just distance from Dean Sammy wants in there, it’s distance from the world.

And whatever idiot decided it was a good idea to break into Sammy’s hospital while Dean is on duty is going to be thinking over that decision long and hard in a jail cell tonight.

Dean sinks into the whine of the siren and the strobe of the light.

* * *

 

By the time he arrives on the scene the security guards are panicking.

That in and of itself isn’t too surprising-- they’re not paid to do actual guard work, they’re paid to keep an eye on doors and look for wanderers. They’re not the ones that handle patients and they’re not the ones that handle cops-- nurses handle patients and administrators handle cops. These guys, they receive marginally more training than a mall cop and they don’t have any kind of weapon, just radios. Dean’s okay with panicky guards, it’s the flurry of nervous energy coming from the  _ nurses _ that has his heartbeat speeding ever more. 

“SPD,” he barks as he barges onto the floor he’s been directed to. His heart is racing, his palms are sweating, and he’s irritated as  _ fuck _ because of  _ course _ it’s the sixth floor.

Of  _ course _ it’s Sammy’s wing.

And his blood turns cold in his veins as he walks up to the scene and realizes that it’s not just Sammy’s  _ wing _ .

The last time he saw this door was the last time he saw his brother. Skinny and pale, dark rings under his eyes, his hair already too long and his clothes hanging baggy on him like he just couldn’t work up the effort to fill them out anymore.

He remembers the weak wave that Sammy gave him, the way he melted, unresisting but unresponsive, into the hug that Dean insisted on.

He remembers the weight of Sammy’s eyes as he left him there. As he heard the door shut behind him.

He remembers how that door never opened to him again.

This is the thing that keeps him awake in the small hours of the night. This is the guilt that keeps him from the confession booth. 

“What’s the situation?” he demands as he gets up to the door.

“The suspect seems to have barricaded himself inside,” the guard says, straightening his spine, obviously trying to sound officious and together and failing. “We’ve been trying to--”

Dean cuts him off with a sharp gesture, and lowers himself to the floor, despite the confused protests of the guard.

He doesn’t know what the herb is, but he knows a barrier when he sees one, and he’s seen this before. In salt, in iron filings. Not in whatever this spicy stuff is, but he knows that you have to break the line.

He braces himself, blows on it. Stands up.

“Stand back,” he says, and draws his gun.

Kicks in the door, which opens easily under his foot.

Steps in.

Oh,  _ fuck _ .

His brother is there ( _ of fucking course your brother is in there you goddamn moron where else would he fucking be _ ).  He’s staring up at the intruder--somehow  _ up _ , looking so small, despite the fact that they’re both sitting on the bed and Sammy is so big, such a massive frame for such a shrinking, timid presence. His eyes don’t leave the intruder for a while, but eventually they tear away and meet Dean’s.

He looks so bad. He looks so  _ little _ . Dean wants to put the gun down, wants to go over to him and just hug him, hug his little brother who looks so scared and skittish and small. Sammy was tall at eighteen, towering at twenty-one, but he’s pulled so far into himself now that Dean feels like he could wrap him up like he did when they were little kids. Like he can pull him out of this like he pulled him out of the fire.

Then Sam whimpers.

Dean can’t right now, though, he can’t deal with this, because the person who Sammy was staring up at is  _ Castiel Novak _ .

He’s staring at Dean, too, now, as wide-eyed as Sammy, his hand on Sammy’s arm, frozen in place as he visibly processes what just happened. Dean can see the wheels turning in his head, the minute wavering of his blue eyes in his deep set sockets, the microscopic quiver of his mouth, forming around words he is abandoning before his  _ barreling _ train of thought.

“Holy shit,” Dean says, and he laughs.

The sound of him is explosively loud in the room, which echoes hugely for being a space barely more than a hundred and ten square feet. He laughs like a shotgun. He laughs like a bark. He wonders, in this extended, stretched time, if the people outside can hear it; if they can hear it on the street; if they can hear it in Jerusalem.

His gun is still raised. Castiel isn’t armed, but he’s not putting it down.

He knows better this time.

“Shit,” Castiel agrees, his voice a lot quieter.

Dean steps into the room.

“Dean,” Sammy whispers.

“I’m gonna take care of this, Sammy,” Dean says, and it kills him but he doesn’t say anything else. He just approaches Castiel and points the gun at him.

Castiel says nothing, just watches him warily, raises his hands.

“Check this out. My old pal, waiting for me. And it’s not even my birthday,” Dean says, and while it’s only half as ecstatic as he really feels he’s earned in this because of the stricken look on Sammy’s face, he can still feel the shit-eating grin stretching across his own features as he gestures with the gun. “Get up, you son of a bitch.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Castiel says, even as he obeys, unfolding himself slowly and carefully from the bed, his hands clearly visible.

Dean’s not sure that makes him less dangerous. Not after Charlie. So he keeps his weapon steady and trained on him.

“I really don’t think I am,” Dean says. “Get away from my brother and out into the hallway. You make a move and I will not hesitate to shoot you. You picked the wrong hospital room tonight, fucking creep.”

Sammy’s eyes don’t leave him. He can feel them. Castiel narrows his eyes, and follows the guidance of the barrel of Dean’s gun out of the room.

“ _ Dean, _ ” Sammy says.

Dean doesn’t turn around.

“I’ve got you--I’ve got this, Sammy, I promise,” Dean says, and when he sees Castiel watching the exchange, he scowls. “Fucking  _ move, _ Novak.”

The use of his name startles Castiel, and he moves.

Dean steps out from Sammy’s room, and this time, he’s the one who closes that door.

The  _ snick _ sounds so horrible and final. Just like last time.

Castiel is watching him like he thinks Dean’ll just shoot him for no reason, like he’s trying to figure out if he can run, if that’ll work out for him.

But he doesn’t have to worry. Dean isn’t gonna shoot him.

If he’s dead, Dean doesn’t get the pleasure of marching him into the station and spending several hours making Castiel Novak’s life a living hell.

He walks him the few feet forward to where the rest of SPD has begun to show up, and as soon as a young lieutenant- name of Hannah?- trains her own weapon on him, Dean stows his in his holster and gets that fucker on the  _ floor _ . 

Sure, there’s walls. 

He pulls out his cuffs. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law,” he growls. He relishes the way the cuffs click and clatter as he snaps them around his wrists. “You have the right at this time to talk to a lawyer and have your lawyer present with you while you are being questioned. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you before questioning, if you wish.” He leans into it, just enough to hear the way his breath puffs out as a little grunt. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he growls.

“Good,” Dean hisses.

* * *

The room is small and stuffy. The two way mirror is directly in front of him; the cuffs are tight on his wrists. He has to lean forward to rub his eyes. He can feel the headache starting there. He hasn’t slept in a couple of days and it’s got him twitchy and headachey and it’s worse under the flourescent lights. 

It’d probably be better if “The Gambler” weren’t playing at top volume in there right now.

This is a  _ big _ fuck up. Incredible fuck up.

Beyond whatever’s happening in that ward, Castiel’s managed to piss off a cop he’s already pissed off before and now apparently the entire precinct is taking it out on him. He’s already had three people come in and do his paperwork- one a guy who insisted on using a sock puppet and falsetto voice to take his information, the other who spoke like he thought Castiel had hearing damage, and a pair- one speaking what appeared to be Cajun French and another translating for him. 

And now “The Gambler.” 

Thing is, Castiel knows his rights. They’ve only got him for twenty four hours before they charge him with anything. He hasn’t asked for his lawyer or his phone call yet. He hasn’t consented to any searches. And he’s waiting for the cop himself-  _ Dean _ Winchester- to show up before he claims his right to silence.

Because Dean Winchester is going to show up. There’s no way he isn’t; Castiel’s no fool. He knows that what’s going on here is the department doing all it can to be passive aggressive and irritating to support its fellow officer. Chances are they know that Winchester’s brother was in that room. And chances are they blame Castiel for what happened to the redhead a few nights ago.

This is a fuckup nothing short of  _ epic _ in scale, and that’s without touching what’s going on with Sam Winchester.

Castiel doesn’t even know where to start with the kid.

On the stereo, just out of reach from his hands, cuffed to the table, Kenny Rogers croons.

Castiel waits.

* * *

 

Dean punches,  _ one two, one, one two three. One two, one, one two three. _ He’s already run a mile on the treadmill and done his lifts for the week. Now he’s at the punching bag, going at it like he’s been going at it for the past forty five minutes. 

He punches,  _ one two, one, one two three _ . The rhythm stays the same, over and over again. His muscles are burning, his chest is burning, his lungs are burning. He should probably get checked out for asthma at some point, but fuck it. He keeps going. 

He thinks about the sound of his brother’s voice. 

_ Dean _ .

_ One two, one, one two three _ .

One time, when Sam was six and Dean was ten, John came home drunk. Angry drunk. Scary drunk. 

Dean shouldn’t have been bothering him, should’ve just gone back to bed and taken Sammy with him, should have just waited it out-- John was trying, he was doing his  _ best, _ he should have known, it wasn’t John’s fault.

But the way Sam had looked at him, after the slap, and the way he had said  _ Daddy _ after it happened.

God, the way his voice had just  _ broken _ .

_ One two, one, one two three. _

They’ve got him for twenty four hours before charging. And because it was Sam’s room he broke into, whether or not charges are pressed falls to  _ Dean _ . 

Dean’s thinking he’s going to wait all twenty four with him in the interrogation room before he charges and lets him into a cell. And then he’s thinking he’s going to be in a cell with a drunk. Maybe they’ll have a chatty one in there. And then he’s thinking that this motherfucker...it’s going to be a long time before this motherfucker sees daylight, because Dean saw his  _ hands _ on his brother. 

_ One two, one, one two three _ .

Dean Winchester will be his ruination.

God, Sammy looked so thin.

_ One two, one, one two three. _

Dean punches, and then he leans forward against the punching bag.

It wasn’t fucking assault. But it  _ was  _ breaking and entering. And Dean  _ is _ going to interrogate him.

He pulls himself away from the punching bag and shrugs his shoulders. Unwraps his hands and walks to the precinct locker room.

* * *

 

Sam sits in his room quietly and watches the door. 

The nurses are taking his vitals, just in case, like they do every morning. The police have cleared out of the wing, and now it’s just three am and the hospital is trying to calm down from what happened.

_ He’d been real. _

Sam’s used to them not being there. He’s used to them being hallucinations or illusions or whispers. One of them is consistent, a blonde guy with burns on his face. Sometimes it’s a blonde woman in a long white gown. Sometimes it’s a woman with dark, dark hair who lays on the bed with him, her name like a jewel in his mouth. And sometimes it’s Jess.

It’s worst when it’s Jess.

But this guy had been  _ real _ . 

He’d been real and he’d  _ touched  _ him and there’d been that water, that water that had jumped away from Sam-- which is a new trick that He’s pulling. But he’d been real. He’d looked at Sam and he’d seen him. He’d laid salt and smoke along the door, like Dean had when Dad went away, made the room smell  _ safe _ . 

He’d looked at Sam like he had really  _ been _ there. 

But he’d seen Dean, too. And Dean spoke to him, but only in words he’d used before.  _ I’ve got you, Sammy. _ Like Sam was still a child. And Sammy was often still a child to Dean, to the Dean who appeared in the hospital, where Dean had promised never to come. Where Sam did not allow Dean. Not the real Dean.

Dean was not, he thinks, real. Dean never is.

But the man, the man who was not an epidemiologist, the man that Sam is  _ very sure _ was real, he went with Dean when Dean told him to.

Sam sighs, unsteady.

This nurse is new. She has short blonde hair and sharp, pinched features. She treats Sam like all of the nurses treat him- one more body under her care. Sam is part of her assembly line. He’s okay with that, sometimes, but it makes him feel even more like he’s just a ghost here. 

She works quickly, makes quick notes. Sam has trouble reading them, the writing swimming in front of his eyes. He always has trouble reading when he gets like this-- had this problem in high school and in college. It’s happens when things get  _ thin _ . It’s another thing that makes him feel that ghostliness.

He looks up from the clipboard, and leaning against the cabinets is the woman with dark hair. She’s short, with big brown eyes. She’s beautiful, like she always is. A madonna in a leather jacket, Sam can practically see the mandorla radiating off of her. It’s not really holiness, but it is a kind of power. Sam doesn’t mistake it for benevolence of sacrality. It is beautiful, though. She  _ is _ beautiful.

That never makes it any better.

“Please,” Sam whispers.

“Oh baby,” she says. “You’ve had a long, night, haven’t you?” She steps forward slowly, cocks her head slowly to the right. She brings her hands forward, pulling up the sleeve of her jacket.

The nurse gets up and leaves the room without acknowledging the woman at all.

She pulls a knife from her belt and slowly makes a long cut on her wrist. She sits next him on the bed, and she brings his head down slowly. He’s so tired, and he cannot bear the thought of protesting, of resisting this.

He blacks out.

* * *

 

When Dean gets back upstairs, Ellen is waiting for him. She’s grinning a little. This is usually not a good thing, but when her eyes cut to the side, Dean relaxes and follows them.

He peers over at the holding cells. There’s a riot of noise coming from one of them, which he assumes is Novak’s.

“It’s been a rough couple of hours for your buddy in there,” Ellen says, her voice dripping with false sympathy. “One of the boys brought in some music so he’s not bored.”

“Thoughtful of them,” Dean replies.

“We aim to please.” Ellen studies him. “I guess you want your turn.”

Dean runs his hands through his hair, still damp from the shower. “We’ve still got time. Twenty-one hours.”

“We are busy people with many things to do,” Ellen says seriously. She puts her hand on his arm. “You all right?”

Dean shrugs, but he doesn’t move Ellen’s hand. She’s his boss, yeah. She’s scary as hell when she wants to be but the one thing he knows about her is that she has his back--she has the whole department’s back. He’s in the right, here, so Ellen is behind him. And more than that, Ellen cares about him, and she cares about Sammy. Hell, Sammy took her daughter to  _ prom _ \- came up from Stanford for a weekend and everything in his sophomore year. Ellen and Jo, they’re family like Bobby is family.  She’ll help him solve this.

“Not the best day I’ve had,” Dean says, closing his eyes and sighing. He rolls his head back, resting on the tension on his shoulders. His shoulders and thighs ache; he just wants to sit down. Fuck, he just wants to sleep, for a long time. He wants to sleep long enough that this all goes away.

“You did good, Dean. Controlled yourself. You got him, and he’s here, now. It’s okay to be happy about this.”

Dean shrugs again. Ellen accepts it this time, turns to glance at where Novak is.

“You gonna press charges?”

Dean snorts. “Fucking right I’m gonna press charges. He was  _ in his room _ .”

“Then yeah. Let him stew for a while.” Ellen smirks. “Hopefully he’s a Kenny Rogers fan.”

“Even if he is, he probably won’t be, after this,” Dean says.

Ellen huffs a laugh and claps Dean on the shoulder before walking away.

Dean walks up to the holding cell, standing in front of it and looking in through the two-way mirror. Novak is sitting there, his hands cuffed tight, leaning forward and trying to rub his head. He looks exhausted, drained. And furious, and worried. His tan trench coat has ridden up around his shoulders; his hair is standing up in every direction. His eyes are closed tight, absolutely, and it has wrinkles and creases along the side of his face. His lips are moving slowly, and Dean can read them- a latin prayer. A  _ Pater Noster _ .

Good.

Dean bangs on the glass, and watches Novak jump. He walks over to the door, unlocks and opens it, and stands in the doorway.

Novak’s eyes widen, then narrow.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “ _ Hi _ .”

“I--” Novak begins.

Suddenly, Dean realizes that he can’t do this. Not yet. He looks at Castiel and he sees his weary face but more than that he sees his  _ hands _ . And Castiel’s hands were on his brother’s arm, gripping him, touching him, and Dean hasn’t been able to hug his brother or pat him on the back or bump his shoulder in  _ four fucking years _ and who gave Castiel fucking Novak the right to touch Sammy when Dean can’t?

Dean realizes that he cannot do this. He cannot do this in a way that won’t cost him his job. Not right now.

So Dean turns his back, walks out the door, and slams it behind him before Castiel can say another word.

See how he likes being walked away from.


	7. Chapter 7

Dean doesn’t go home.

He stays at the precinct all day. He catches a two-hour nap in Ellen’s office, and mostly paces around, doing paperwork, an hour or two of patrol, and watching his coworkers torment Castiel in ways that are not technically illegal but are definitely dickish.

It’s the way that Castiel doesn’t break that gets to Dean. He’s annoyed, he’s ashen, he’s exhausted, alternatingly. He prays a lot.

He prays the same prayers that Dean knows. Latin. Ancient. He prays other prayers that Dean can’t lip read, but he prays.

Once in a while he’ll get angry, yank on the cuffs and shout something. But he doesn’t ask for a lawyer and he doesn’t ask for a phone call.

It pisses Dean off.

But Dean lets him be. He lets him be, and he stays away, and he watches from outside the two-way and it isn’t until that night, it isn’t until hour fifteen of the twenty-four that they have before charging him--it isn’t until then that he gives in.

He slams into the room where “The Gambler” is still blaring. Castiel jumps.

“I have--”

Dean cuts him off with a gesture, sits down on the little aluminum chair on the other side of the table and leans heavily across it, letting his shoulders take the weight away. They untense. They ease. 

“All right. Please,” Dean says. “Continue. I am  _ quite _ interested in hearing what you have to say.”

Novak’s expression schools into something steely and adversarial. Dean slams the stereo silent.

“Something is wrong,” Castiel says.

“You’re damn right there is,” Dean says. “You broke into a  _ hospital _ and antagonized a long term  _ patient _ .”

“That long term patient happened to be your brother,” Castiel says. “And you should be more  _ concerned _ about him.”

Dean gets up from the table and stands in front of the door.

_ One two, one, one two three. _

He sits back down.

“Why did you break into the hospital?” Dean asks.

“How did  _ you _ get into the room?” Castiel shoots back.

Dean leans on the table, getting close. “What, past your little security fence? What was that, oregano? You some kind of kitchen witch?”

Castiel looks surprised. “You broke the line. Intentionally?”

“Yes. Go figure, the cop’s not a total meathead.”

“How did you know to do that?”

Dean sits up straighter, takes his badge off, studies it. Castiel stiffens, a quick tensing of his shoulders, but Dean just hums thoughtfully and puts it back on his shirt.

“Yeah, no, that’s what I thought.  _ I’m _ the cop here, so I’ll ask the questions. You’re in a fuckload of trouble,  _ Castiel _ . I’m not gonna say it’ll go  _ easy _ for you if you cooperate, but it’ll be better if you do.”

“Better for whom?” Castiel asks.

Dean smiles. “Better for everybody. So. Why’d you do it?”

Castiel leans back, his wrists tugging slightly against the cuffs. “I have the right to remain silent, I seem to recall.”

Dean’s smile ices over.

“Yeah,” he says. “You do. You have the right to remain silent. So if you’re gonna take old Miranda up on that offer, then you can shut the fuck up and listen to me. You know that was my brother’s room you broke into--I think you knew it when you did it. Fuck knows  _ why _ you’d decide that was a good idea, but you did. And you know what that means?”

Castiel doesn’t say anything.

“That means  _ I _ get to press charges. For your little B&E. For fucking with my brother. The judges? They like me. And the max sentence is twenty months. That’s a long time to not see the sun. I’m gonna go for every day of that twenty months, and something tells me that good behavior isn’t your forte.”

Castiel still doesn’t speak, but everything about him tightens. His lips press thin, and his fingertips dig against the table surface. A muscle in his jaw jumps.

Dean leans back in.

“My kid brother didn’t deserve what you did to him. And I don’t know what kind of freak you are, what kind of thrill you get from letting people who try to kill cops get away and traumatizing psych patients, but I’m gonna make sure that you’re put away. Capisce?”

“ _ I’m _ not the one who doesn’t understand here,” Castiel hisses.

Dean furrows his brow. “Thought you were remaining silent.”

“If you get me put away, things will not get better. There is something wrong in that hospital, and if you don’t let me fix it, there won’t be anyone who can.”

The weird thing is how serious Castiel sounds. Not like he’s trying to play Dean, not like he’s trying to bullshit. Like he believes himself.

“The only thing wrong with Pacific is that their security apparently isn’t worth shit,” Dean says. “The only thing  _ wrong _ there is that  _ you _ broke in and terrorized my brother.”

“How do you know I terrorized him?” Castiel asks. “You didn’t talk to him. You didn’t ask. I didn’t hurt your brother. But something will.”

“Please,  _ God _ , tell me that’s a threat,” Dean growls. “Tell me you’re stupid enough to threaten a police officer’s brother while you’re cuffed to a table at the god damned police station.”

“ _I am not the threat,_ ” Castiel says, jerking against his bonds. His teeth are bared, the veins in his neck protruding. “But there _is_ a threat and _I_ keep trying to fix it and _you_ _keep fucking it up_.”

“Then what is it?” Dean asks. “What is the threat, if it’s not you?”

Castiel’s eyes lock with his, and Dean feels himself tense. Castiel’s eyes are blue like lightning, sharp and furious and they pin Dean to the rickety aluminum chair he sits in.

“Have you  _ ever _ listened to a word your brother says?” Castiel asks.

Dean is recovering from that when Hannah opens the door and leans in.

“Dean, there’s a call for you,” she says.

Dean takes a long breath.

“I am,” he says, “a  _ little bit busy _ , Hannah.”

“I said that, but the kid’ll only talk to you. It sounds urgent, Dean. I wouldn’t have interrupted you otherwise. You know that.”

Castiel is staring him down, and Dean doesn’t break eye contact as he stands up.

“I’ll be right back,” he says. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Castiel is saying as Dean closes the door behind himself.

He follows Hannah to the front desk. “This better be good,” he mutters, and takes the phone. “Winchester.”

“ _ Dean? O-officer Winchester? _ ”

Dean’s hand tightens around the receiver. The voice is whispered, all but inaudible, but he knows that cadence and he knows that panic.

“Kevin?”

“ _ I-I’m--I c-can’t find Cas. Castiel. I c-can’t find him and I’m in t-tr-tr-troub-” _

“Breathe for me, Kevin,” Dean says, trying to keep the worry out of his voice. “Tell me where you are. I’m gonna come find you. It’s gonna be okay. Where are you?”

“ _ I’m at D-Dearborn. Under the N-ninety overpass. _ ”

In front of Pacific. Dean’s breath catches in his throat.

He grabs his coat and fishes his keys out of his pocket. “You need me to send a squad car to you or can you hang on ten minutes? I can be there in ten. Probably less.”

“ _ Y-you, please, n-nobody else, but h-hurry. I-I’m hiding now b-but I d-don’t know how lllllong I can-- _ ”

“I’m leaving now, Kevin,” Dean says. “Hang on. Don’t move. I’m on my way.”

He slams the phone down onto the cradle. Hannah’s frowning, worried, when he looks up.

“You need backup?” she asks.

“He doesn’t want anybody else,” Dean says. “He’s a twitchy kid. I’m sure it’s nothing. Let me go figure this out and if I need backup I’ll call.”

“Be safe,” Hannah says, sounding unconvinced.

“Always,” Dean lies, and rushes out to the car.

* * *

 

The bar is a hole in the wall. No windows, one door. Big mirror along the back, reflecting the rest of bar behind the bartender. Bottles of third flight tequila and whiskey next to bad gin and skunky whiskey. The beer is flat and watery. The music is barely audible, but whether that’s the fault of the ancient, buzzing speakers or the roaring buzz of conversation, Gabriel can’t tell. This isn’t a  _ brewpub _ or a  _ microbrewery _ \- it’s a bar. A dive. 

It’s not so much that Pamela is  _ salty _ or that she has a chip on her shoulder- it’s that Pamela is an avatar of salt, of chipped shoulder, of being from the wrong side of the tracks.

She sits next to Gabriel in her dark sunglasses, long dark hair curling in waves about her face, and she nurses her beer. 

“I didn’t think you’d show up,” she says. “Soft, Mercer Island boy like you.”

Gabriel smiles. “C’mon, Pamela, I could tear it up with the best of them and you know it.”

Pamela snorts. “What do you want?” She asks.

“What makes you think I want something?” Gabriel responds, wincing through the beer. It really is awful, it can’t just be him. 

“Gabriel, I’m blind, not stupid. You don’t like me and you wouldn’t talk to me- much less offer to buy me a drink- if you didn’t want something,” she answers, taking another drink.

“Winchester,” Gabriel says.

“Buy me a shot,” she says, instantly. 

Gabriel gestures to the bartender, and he pulls down a bottle of rotgut and two shot glasses. He places them before the two of them, pours them each a shot. He leaves the bottle there, as if there’s something he knows that Gabriel doesn’t. 

“Did you know I haven’t actually been blind that long?” She says.

Gabriel coughs around his shot, and then he looks at her.

“What?” He says.

“True story,” she says. “Three and a half years ago- three years, eight months ago. Wasn’t blind. Didn’t even wear glasses.”

“And you’re saying it’s Sam Winchester’s fault,” Gabriel says.

“I’m saying that I was on Sam Winchester’s team as his primary counselor for four months, in which period he did not speak to me at all. Literally, at all. Didn’t even look at me. Just sat there, in the room. Kid held his knees and looked at the floor. Four months of me making small talk with myself.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel says, “sounds like the kid.”

“One day, I come in for his session, and he says  _ one thing _ to me,” she continues. She holds up a tall, slender finger.  _ One thing _ . 

“I only know that  because I wrote it in the file. I don’t even remember what it was,” she says. “Literally, I can’t remember and it’s not written or documented anywhere. But after that session, I went home and went to bed and I had this dream, this dream I was in Sam Winchester’s room, with Sam Winchester. I was holding his hand and we were speaking a language I’ve never heard before and I haven’t heard  _ since _ and suddenly, there was incredible light. When I woke up, I found out I had spent two weeks in a  _ hospital _ after having a tonic-clonic seizure in my  _ sleep _ . No history of epilepsy in my family, no seizures since. And I’m  _ blind _ ,” she says.

“Bull-shit,” Gabriel says. 

Pamela crosses herself, over her chest. Her finger makes an elegant  _ x _ , right over her heart. 

The sit at the bar for a long time, and not saying anything.

“And you’re still on his team?” Gabriel says.

“Fuck yes,” Pamela answers. “Guy makes you blind in your sleep, you’re gonna hang on and see where this train takes you. I’m in for the long ride.” 

Gabriel feels a totalizing  _ respect _ for Pamela blossom inside of himself, and a sudden understanding for why the bartender left the bottle.

“Did you know,” she says, “it’s actually really hard to find guys who want to fuck a blind girl?”

“Again I say bullshit,” Gabriel says, but something about Pamela’s demeanor gives him pause.

Pamela laughs around her drink. “Because what? I look like I get laid a lot?”

“Because despite being insufferable, hostile, and condescending, you’re hot as hell and tough as fuck,” Gabriel says, well in advance of giving his mouth permission to speak.

There’s a brief silence.

“Guys think I’m fragile,” Pamela says.

Gabriel laughs out loud. Pamela grins along with him.

“I’m having a hard time imagining someone getting far enough to know you’re blind and still having the balls to say you’re  _ fragile _ , Pamela.”

“Aw, jeez, Gabriel,” she says. “You really know how to make a woman feel special.”

He looks at her, at her crooked smile, at her  _ lipstick _ just barely outside the line of her lips, and he realizes that the fact that her blindness is  _ new _ is painfully obvious. And that she’s beautiful. And that he’s lonely. And that she’s  _ interested _ .

“We doin’ this?” He asks.

Pamela’s smile goes from crooked to full blown.

* * *

So it’s not like Kevin doesn’t  _ know _ he shouldn’t be out by himself. He knows.

It’s just that he needed some fresh air. It’s just that the calculus and his mom’s hovering and the gut-wrenching paranoia that’s been settled in him ever since he’d had to say the words  _ black eyes _ to Cas were really getting to him and he really just needed to step out for a bit and Cas wasn’t answering his phone so he just had to go alone.

He hasn’t been out much since It Happened. He’s jumpy, now. He didn’t see it coming the first time, and he doesn’t trust that he’ll see it coming this time, but he just wants to get some barbecue and head back home and finish his homework. In and out. Or rather out and in. Easy.

He wishes, a lot, that things had been different, but that’s pointless. He wishes more that he could get over it. That he could shake it off and say that he has the tattoo, now, that nothing can jump him like that anymore, and that anything a human could do to him would pale so far by comparison with what he’s already been through that he just doesn’t have room to fear anymore.

But there’s room. There’s  _ always _ room for more fear.

He brushes his fingers over his chest, where the tattoo sits. Cas had gone with him to get it, to make sure that the artist did it exactly, perfectly right--even though it was Cas who’d picked the artist in the first place. He remembers watching Cas’s face, to distract himself from the pain: watching Cas’s eyes narrowed as the gun moved, as the needle pierced his skin, locking out anything but  _ Kevin _ . He remembers thinking  _ he’ll take care of me _ . Two weeks later, mom went in and got one of her own, right over her heart.

He was right. Cas does take care of him. But he feels like such a fucking burden, sometimes.

He’d even called Cas to come out and get barbecue with him. When Cas didn’t answer he went out anyway, but he’d called first--instinctively, reflexively. Kevin is going outside, Cas or Mom gets called. It’s childish to think that either Cas or his mom could protect him completely from whatever else lurks out here, but like a kid hiding under his blanket, it makes him feel better. It’s a ritual, and if there’s anything Kevin’s learned from Cas, it’s that rituals are inherently powerful, even if you’re the only one practicing it.

Not tonight.

Tonight, he feels acutely how alone he is and how long it’s been since he went out of the house without another person next to him.

He’d managed to get to the barbecue place and order more or less without incident. He’d stumbled over a few words, but the lady at the counter was older and kind and patient with him, not jumping in and interjecting words or glaring at him with that look that says  _ get the fuck on with it _ that never fails to make Kevin stutter even more. He’s been to this place a few times, and it’s nice. It’s good food. Good pork. She’d given him the two brown paper bags, white plastic bags loaded up inside, and sent him out, back into the night.

It gets dark early in Seattle, sometimes at three in the afternoon. 

It’s not three right now, though, it’s nine at night and it’s supposed to be dark. It’s dark everywhere right now, across North America. But it’s not supposed to be so dark here, it’s a city, and cities aren’t black, cities are brown at night from the leftover light from streetlamps. But it doesn’t feel like a brown kind of darkness, it feels like a  _ cave _ kind of darkness. A pitch kind of darkness, something older and darker and sicker than should be here, should be in this city.

It’s safer in the cities, and this is part of the reason why.

But that security is gone right now. Kevin has his phone in his hand, even with his arms wrapped around the food, and he walks as fast as he can back towards home.

He’s rounding corners and going down the streets deeper into the International District and he’s trying to avoid _ it  _ because  _ it _ always feels wrong, all the time, and nothing stops that-- not really-- but it’s fucking magnetic or something because it confronts him, there atop the hill like a bird of prey, watching the city below.

Kevin feels his breath rattle around in his throat, and he dodges behind a concrete pillar holding up the roar of I-90 above him, just to get away from the panoptic eye of the PPH. He tries to calm down, god, he really tries.

He peers out from around the pillar, and the building is still there. It’s not like it would move or anything, but there’s something comforting to the thought that it can’t stalk closer to him like a lion. 

He looks around, and across the street, at the foot of the hill directly below the hospital, are two people.

_ Not _ two people.

As in, two of  _ them _ . 

Moving slowly, Kevin bends down and places the bags on the ground. And he takes out his phone and he tries calling Castiel again.

He tries calling him six times, and he still doesn’t answer.

Kevin resists the urge to kick something or growl or scream or cry, and he dials Gabriel, who also doesn’t answer. He tries both his cell and his office number, four times each, and there’s no answer. 

He’s  _ stranded _ here, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea  except it’s less “the deep blue sea” and the devils  _ are pretty real _ and he takes a deep breath, a big, deep breath, as quietly as he can, and he dials the non-emergency number for the Seattle Police Department.

“Seattle Police Department, West Precinct,” a woman answers. 

“I-I-I need to sp-speak to O-o-o-off-officer D-Dean Winchester,” Kevin hisses into the phone. “N-n-now.”

* * *

 

Dean drives as fast as he can and parks three blocks away from where Kevin said he was. He’s still in his street clothes, but he’s got his badge and his weapon. He jogs, not even feeling the exercise he did earlier today. 

This is too close to Sam’s hospital, again, and the thought of  _ two _ incidents here in the same day makes his blood freeze cold. 

He remembers for a moment the cold-fire fury of Castiel Novak.

He runs, turns, and then Kevin’s right there, leaning against a concrete pylon, two brown paper bags next to him on the ground. He’s clutching his phone like it’s some kind of talisman. He looks thrilled to see Dean. Still panicky, still  _ terrified _ , but thrilled to not be stuck, alone, in this bullshit.

Dean jogs over to the pylon and leans against it. “What’s up?” Dean asks, keeping his voice low.

Kevin gestures behind himself with a thumb and closes his eyes tight. The hand holding the phone worms under his shirt and scratches against his chest. 

Dean peers around the pylon, looks to the base of the hill.

There are two women, one with dark hair and another, a blonde. The blonde is wearing weird clothes, a long white gown like she’s going to prom or something. Dean frowns. The woman with dark hair stands like a soldier, shoulders and hips square, her stance wide and authoritative. Her back is straight. They look like they’re talking.

Dean has a weird feeling, but he doesn’t see what Kevin’s seeing.

He sees something at the blonde woman’s feet though, an old guy. Dirty hat and clothes, looks like he might live out on the street. He’s laying on the ground, but his body’s at a weird angle-- something’ wrong about his shoulders and neck.

The woman with dark hair, she pulls a knife out of her belt and she kneels down, beside the man at the blonde woman’s feet.

Dean thinks he can hear her slit the man’s throat. He knows it’s psychosomatic, that the noise that makes can’t be audible from nearly a hundred yards away, but he thinks he can hear it, and that pulls up a chill in his spine.

And then he sees a column of  _ pitch black smoke _ billow from the corpse, into the air. It moves like a cloud, roiling heavy with thunder and lightning, waiting to happen. He watches it with his mouth open. He watches it, and his hand fumbles in his pocket for his rosary.

Kevin’s eyes squeeze shut even tighter.

Dean moves slowly, silently, to put his body between the kid and this horror that is happening across the street.

Because this--this is more than before. This is vivid and present and real in a way that laying salt lines to keep the boogeyman out, it just  _ wasn’t _ . This is--what? This is damnation, unfolding in front of him? Is this his soul in peril? Is this the wickedness and snares of the Devil?

Dean breathes, “ _ In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. _ ”

Kevin breathes, “ _ Fuck _ .”

The blonde woman looks up.

The blonde  _ thing _ looks up.

Dean’s body jolts into action and he shoves Kevin roughly.

“Act  _ really disorderly _ ,” he hisses.

The thought passes through his mind that this could really, really easily not work, because Kevin is a twitchy, panicky kid and he could very easily fold under this kind of pressure.

In retrospect, he’d realize that if he could count on Kevin for anything in that moment, it was freaking out.

Kevin  _ freaks out _ . Starts hollering and cursing and saying he knows his rights. It takes Dean a minute to realize that he’s being obeyed, and then he does his best impression of wrestling Kevin into submission without actually hurting the kid. He pulls out his handcuffs and starts rattling off the miranda and then he marches the kid, away from the pylons, all while Kevin keeps it up. 

To the kid’s credit, he doesn’t stutter once during the whole thing and he keeps it up until they get to the car, at which point, Dean gets him out of the handcuffs and lets him into the front seat.

He jams the key into the ignition, and they drive out of there, as fast as they can, and Dean keeps praying.

Kevin’s not shouting anymore, but he  _ is _ still swearing.

Dean looks over at him and says, “Alright. Let’s talk.”

And Kevin looks back at him and shouts, “My mom told you we were doing you a fucking favor!”

* * *

 

It’s quiet and empty in the room for forty five minutes. Nothing’s going on, no one’s saying anything, there’s no music. It’s almost right for Castiel to lean forward a little bit more and rest his head on the table, maybe try to get some sleep. The room is just the right combination of public and private, of watched and peaceful, for him to get a little rest right now. Nothing will come after him in here- too many witnesses, would take too much effort. Castiel’s not important, he’s just on the radar, which isn’t as bad as being important but will still royally fuck up your life.

Sam Winchester, though, that poor kid...that kid’s important.

His eyes have  _ just _ drifted shut when the door  _ explodes _ open and Dean Winchester storms inside. 

He looks pale, a little clammy, and sweat is sticking along his hairline. He’s got sweat on his shirt and his badge is rankled on the chain around his neck. The door drifts close.

“What the  _ fuck _ ,” he shouts, “did you do?”

Castiel looks at him, feeling thunder boil in his skin. “What did  _ I _ do?” Castiel shouts back. “What did  _ you _ do? Where did you go?”

“There’s a kid at my desk who’s trying to pull himself down from a panic attack because I just hauled ass down to the bottom of Beacon Hill to find him trapped by two  _ god-knows-whats letting out what looked like thunderclouds in old bums _ !”

Castiel tries to stand, but the cuffs jerk him down, attached to the table. “Where’s Kevin?” He says. “What did he do-- what happened?”

“He called the station and asked for me-”

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t dragged me down here-”

“ _ This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t broken into my brother’s room!” _

“ _ Do you believe me now _ ?” Castiel shouts, his voice filling the room.

Gabriel calls it his  _ big voice _ . It’s something Father and Michael used to do, a long time ago, when they got into arguments. Gabriel never quite got the hang of it, but Castiel- Castiel’s  _ great  _ at the big voice. When he’s trying, no one’s got a bigger voice than him. 

Dean looks at him, all fire and bluster and impotent, incompetent rage. “What’s happening?” he asks.

Castiel looks at him as he sits down. His arms drape over the table, and he settles into a strange posture, like a big cat in a cage.

“Two demons,” Castiel says, “important ones, letting a minor one out of its vessel. Outside of your brother’s hospital. Your brother, he’s...I’m not sure. I don’t know, I’m not certain. His file, it said there was the  _ devil _ inside of-”

“His  _ file _ ?” Dean cries. “How the fuck did you-”

“His therapist- Gabriel  _ Novak _ ?” Castiel interrupts. 

Dean stands up. Paces to the wall and  _ punches _ it, hard.

“Schizophrenics, they hear demons. That’s not unusual. Happens all the time. But the  _ Devil _ ? The Devil-- Lucifer himself? That’s weird. That merits investigation.”

“ _ Merits investigation, _ ” Dean says, his hand pressed against the wall where he struck it. He’s turned, glaring at Castiel. “And that’s how you investigate? You break into psych patients’ hospital rooms? Doesn’t your--what, brother? Gabriel’s your brother? Doesn’t he  _ work there _ ?”

“My brother isn’t me,” Castiel says. “He doesn’t have the expertise--”

Castiel breaks off as Dean strides away from the wall, back at his chair within three steps, leaning on the table and looming over him.

“That is what I’m talking about,” Dean says, his voice low. “Expertise. That’s exactly what you’re gonna tell me about right the fuck now because I have been out to that godforsaken hospital  _ twice _ in twenty-four hours cleaning up  _ your shit _ . That kid at my desk is freaking out and I am pretty damn sure it’s your fault. I saved your boy wonder’s ass and now you owe me an explanation. So start with the explaining.”

“Explain what?” Castiel asks, leaning forward himself, meeting Dean halfway. He glares up at him, letting him know how little the height difference intimidates him. “Where do you want me to start? That monsters and demons and worse exist? That your schizophrenic brother was right all along? That the  _ Devil _ is rooming in your brother’s head? Where should I start, Dean? What are you willing to know?”

Castiel is expecting one of a number of things. Dean Winchester is obviously a hothead, so an explosion is not out of the question. That or a breakdown. The guy had seen his brother, who, for all his faults, he obviously cares about a lot, in a potentially traumatic situation and then he got to watch a demon smoke out of its vessel alongside  _ Kevin _ , who, for all his strengths, is not the best tour guide to the supernatural.

What he does not expect is for Dean’s gaze to drop to the table, for him to sit heavily in his seat, and for him to take several steadying breaths--not the kind that scream  _ I’m calming myself down so I don’t beat the shit out of you _ but the genuine kind.

“Are you saying my brother’s not cr--not sick?” Dean asks. His voice is so quiet Castiel almost can’t hear it. He isn’t looking up but Castiel can see the hope in his eyes.

He almost feels bad about what he has to say next.

“That is  _ not _ what I’m saying.”

When Dean’s hope crumbles, it becomes anger.

“So my brother says he’s got the Devil in his head, you say he’s got the Devil in his head, and he’s still nuts? So are you nuts, too?”

“Do you think that everything a person with schizophrenia says is automatically wrong?” Castiel asks, cocking an eyebrow in a way he knows is obnoxious. The kid gloves can’t really  _ come off _ because they were never  _ on _ , strictly speaking, but he’s been in this fucking interrogation room for  _ sixteen hours _ and he is  _ done _ .

“No, you fucking asshole, but I was assuming that the Devil thing wasn’t the exception that proves the rule.”

Castiel watches as Dean’s face starts to turn red. He calculates that he’s about two more barbs away from police brutality, but his calibrations may be off because he doesn’t  _ actually _ know this guy.

“Your brother is in trouble, Dean,” Castiel says. “I can help him. But I can’t do it from prison.”

Dean glowers. “I have no reason to trust you.”

“Just that I’m right,” Castiel replies, sitting back in his chair.

Dean narrows his eyes at him, then stands up and pushes his chair back under the table. Castiel feels a jolt of surprise when he turns his back on him and walks toward the door.

“Dean, I am the  _ only person _ who can help your brother,” he shouts.

Dean stops, turns so that Castiel can see his profile, and makes a big show of checking his watch.

“I got another eight hours before I have to decide whether to press charges,” Dean says.

Castiel’s eyes widen.

“And you had your hands on my sick kid brother.”

Castiel opens his mouth, but Dean slaps the  _ play _ button on the stereo and walks out of the room before he can get a word out.

_ Fuck. _

* * *

 

Kevin’s still sitting at his desk, his hands wrapped around a cup of chamomile tea. He looks like he’s not really there; a certain kind of absence is in his eyes. A thousand yard stare.

Dean sits down in the chair at his desk, and Kevin blinks out of it. Looks at Dean and says, “Where’s Cas?”  
“Interrogation,” Dean answers. 

Kevin frowns. “Why?”

“He broke the law,” Dean replies, running his hand over his face. God, he’s tired. Right down to his bones. “I’m trying to figure out-” He pauses. “Who is Castiel? To you?”

Kevin’s face creases to a frown. 

“This isn’t...I’m not going to arrest you. I’m just...I’m asking as someone...please,” he finishes, looking at the kid, who himself looks tired. 

Kevin sighs, again. “I had one of those in me,” he says, quietly. He looks flinchy. Nervy. “A-a-a-a...a d-demon. T-two years ago. I-I-I-I kind of rrrrremember sometimes. Flashes.” He looks at Dean, and his face twists. He looks  _ heavy _ . “It was  _ bad _ .”

It makes Dean think of Sammy.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says. It’s not enough. But it’s something.

Kevin meets his eyes, for just a moment, like he’s weighing Dean’s sympathy. He eventually nods and looks away again.

“Castiel exorcised the d--” Kevin breaks off, composes himself. “The d- _ demon _ . He helped--he  _ helps _ me put the p-pieces together. And my mm _ mom _ , it-it-it’s just the two of us and she--Castiel helps  _ her. _ ”

Dean threads his fingers through his short hair, and he props his elbows on the desk, cradling his head in his hands.

“He’s good,” Kevin says quietly. “He’s, um,. A good...a good guy.”

“You’re what, twelve?” Dean retorts.

Kevin looks actually insulted. “ _ Seventeen _ .”

“No offense, but I know  _ I _ was a shit judge of character at seventeen,” Dean says. He sounds as exhausted as he feels, and he can hear his voice growing gravelly. “He helped you. That’s great. I’m glad, kid, really.” He can’t even muster up the  _ but _ before he trails off.

They sit in silence for a while. Kevin sips at his tea, and Dean tries to stop the throbbing behind his eyes and not fall asleep while the kid’s still at his desk. It is an uphill battle.

Finally, Kevin breaks the silence.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t an asshole,” he whispers. He pauses again, before adding, “Are you gonna charge him?”

The kid’s voice is quiet, hesitant, and, if Dean’s being honest, he can hear the fear in it. The kid’s afraid that Dean is going to take away his protector. He looks up, just a little, and Kevin’s expression confirms it. Drawn, pale. His lip bitten just a little.

Dean doesn’t answer.

“Please don’t,” Kevin whispers.

“He broke into my little brother’s hospital room,” Dean says. “My brother is real sick, Kevin. What your friend did could’ve set him back a long way.”

“Cas knows what he’s doing,” Kevin says. “P- _ please _ , Officer W-Winchester. I n-n-need him. And so do y-you. And your brother.”

Dean tenses. His voice is low when he says, “Kid, you seem okay, so I’m gonna tell you once. Don’t  _ ever _ tell me what my brother needs.”

“C-cas can hhh _ help _ you,” Kevin says, the urgency in his voice building, driving up the rhythm of his stutter and shoving the words out of his mouth. “ _ He can _ . B-but you’ve gotta help hhh _ him, _ too, Officer W-w-winchester. You can’t p-press charges.”

“I sure as hell  _ can _ press charges.”

Dean can hear how petulant he sounds but he’s a little beyond giving a shit.

Kevin’s eyes grow dark, even past the sheen of tears that threaten. And  _ fuck _ , Dean didn’t mean to make the kid  _ cry _ . But maybe it’s for the best. Linda said the kid was Stanford-bound. You don’t get to Stanford by hanging around with psycho criminals like Castiel Novak. Exorcist or not, he’s not the type to write a real convincing letter of recommendation.

“If you take him away, what happens to me--and you--and your  _ brother _ is on you.”

Kevin shoves himself up out of his chair and storms over to the lobby, where he hunkers down with his tea. Dean stands and sees Hannah raising an eyebrow, but he shakes his head and mouths  _ he’s with me _ . Hannah nods, goes back to her paperwork.

Dean sits back down.

On him if something happens to Sammy. To this kid.

Of all the things for the kid not to stutter on--for him to be perfectly clear and deliberate on--why did it have to be that?


End file.
